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ANCIENT CLASSICS 

FOR 

ENGLISH READERS. 

A SERIES OF MONTHLY VOLUMES. 
Price 2s. 6d. bound in cloth. 

The aim of the present series will be to explain, sufficiently 
for general readers, who these great writers were, and what 
they wrote ; to give, wherever possible, some connected out- 
line of the story which they tell, or the facts which they 
record, checked by the results of modern investigations ; to 
present some of their most striking passages in approved 
English translations, and to illustrate them generally from 
modern writers ; to serve, in short, as a popular retrospect 
of the chief literature of Greece and Home. 

Volumes now published — 

I. HOMER: The Hiad. 
II. HOMER: The Odyssey. 

III. HERODOTUS. 

IV. CJESAR: The Commentaries. 
V. VIRGIL. 



OPINIONS OF TEE PRESS. 
Times, January 10. 

' ' We can confidently recommend this first volume of * Ancient 
Classics for English Readers' to all who have forgotten their 
Greek, and desire to refresh their knowledge of Homer. As for 
those to whom the series is chiefly addressed, who have never 
learned Greek at all, this little book gives them an opportunity 
which they had not before — an opportunity not only of remedy- 
ing a want they must have often felt, but of remedying it by no 
patient and irksome toil, but by a few hours of pleasant reading." 

Civil Service Gazette, January 15. 
" No more happy idea has been conceived of late than that of 
which this is the first instalment. ... If the other volumes 
to follow equal the ' Iliad,' the series will be a most charming and 
instructive one, and the * Ancient Classics for English Readers ' 
will be a most invaluable aid to modern education." 



Saturday Review, January 8. 

" If the other volumes are as well executed as this, the monthly 
issue will soon furnish excellent guidance to the whole field of 
classical literature, and when the way is thus rendered clear, 
good translations will be read with far more pleasure and dis- 
crimination. We anticipate that the judicious and novel design 
of such a series will meet, as it deserves, with widespread and 
lasting favour ; and that, with its success, juster ideas will more 
generally prevail of the characteristics of the great writers of old." 

Lincoln Mercury. 

1 ' The idea of this rendering of the classics is a very happy one, 
and the work, judging from the first volume, is likely to be 
carried out with scholarly taste and judgment. ,, 

Liverpool Albion. 

"Few can learn Greek and Latin sufficiently well to read the 
classics in the original, and few have time in this busy age to 
read elaborate translations ; but these concise prose sketches of 
the great classics will be within the scope of all readers, and will 
be welcome to most of them." 

Glasgow Citizen. 
' ' A series of this kind must prove at once interesting and use- 
ful, and we anticipate for it a large measure of success." 

Sherborne Journal. 
"In fact these are classical novels, and it will speak well of 
the taste of the age if they are read as generally as they deserve 
to be." 

Bristol Mercury. 
"It offers a compendious way of introducing the masterpieces 
of antiquity, and of teaching the uninitiated something of their 
character and merits. Mr Collins has certainly inaugurated the 
undertaking with ability and taste." 

Northampton Herald. 

" The publication of these volumes marks an epoch in the his- 
tory of English literature, inasmuch as by means of this admirable 
series of little books, the non-classical reader is placed in a position, 
with regard to the great writers of Greece and Rome, that will 
enable him the more fully to appreciate those of his own country." 



Ancient Classics for English Readers 

EDITED BY THE 

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A. 



HOMER 



THE ODYSSEY 



HOMER 



THE ODYSSEY 



BY THE 

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A. 

AUTHOR UF 
'ETONIANA,' 'the PUBLIC SCHOOLS,' ETC. 




WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
MDCCCLXX 



,v 



o 



> 






CONTENTS. 



PAGE 
INTRODUCTION, 1 

CHAP. I. PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS, ... 9 

II. TELEMACHUS GOES IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER, 26 

III. ULYSSES WITH CALYPSO AND THE PH^ACIANS, 43 

IV. ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS, . 65 
V. THE TALE CONTINUED — THE VISIT TO THE 

SHADES, . 78 

VI. ULYSSES* RETURN TO ITHACA, . . .89 

VII. THE RETURN OF TELEMACHUS FROM SPARTA, 95 

VIII. ULYSSES REVISITS HIS PALACE, . . .100 

IX. THE DAY OF RETRIBUTION, . . . .109 

X. THE RECOGNITION BY PENELOPE, . . .116 

XI. CONCLUDING REMARKS, . . . .125 



It has "been thought desirable in these pages to use the 


Latin names of the Homeric deities and heroes, as more 


familiar to English ears. As, 


however, most modern tran- 


slators have followed Homer's Greek nomenclature, it may 


be convenient here to give both. 




Zeus 


= 


Jupiter. 


Here 


= 


Juno. 


Ares 


= 


Mars. 


Poseidon 


= 


Neptune. 


Pallas Athene 


= 


Minerva. 


Aphrodite 


= 


Venus. 


Hephaistos 


= 


Vulcan. 


Hermes 


= 


Mercury. 


Artemis 


= 


Diana. 


Odysseus 


= 


Ulysses. 


Aias 




Ajax. 



The passages quoted, unless otherwise specified, are from 
the admirable translation of Mr Worsley. 



INTKODUCTION, 



The poem of the Odyssey is treated in these pages as 
the work of a single author, and that author the same 
as the composer of the Iliad. It would be manifestly 
out of place, in. a volume which does not profess to be 
written for critical scholars, to discuss a question on 
which they are so far from being agreed. But it may 
be satisfactory to assure the reader who has neither 
leisure nor inclination to enter into the controversy, 
that in accepting, as we do, the Odyssey as from the 
same " Homer" to whom we owe the Tale of Troy, he 
may fortify himself by the authority of many accom- 
plished scholars who have carefully examined the ques- 
tion. Though none of the incidents related in the 
Iliad are distinctly referred to in the Odyssey — a point 
strongly urged by those who would assign the poems to 
different authors — and therefore the one cannot fairly 
be regarded as a sequel to the other, yet there is no 
important discrepancy, either in the facts previously 
assumed, or in the treatment of such characters as appear 
upon the scene in both. 

a. c. vol. ii. A 



2 HOMER, 

The character of the two poems is, indeed, essentially 
different. The Iliad is a tale of the camp and the 
battle-field: the Odyssey combines the romance of 
travel with that of domestic life. The key-note of the 
Iliad is glory : that of the Odyssey is rest. This was 
amongst the reasons which led one of the earliest of 
Homer's critics to the conclusion that the Odyssey was 
the work of his old age. In both poems the interest 
lies in the situations and the descriptions, rather than 
in what we moderns call the " plot." This latter is not 
a main consideration with the poet, and he has no hesi- 
tation in disclosing his catastrophe beforehand. The 
interest, so far as this point is concerned, is also weak- 
ened for the modern reader by the intervention through- 
out of supernatural agents, who, at the most critical 
turns of the story, throw their irresistible weight into 
the scale. Yet, in spite of this, the interest of the 
Odyssey is intensely human. Greek mythology and 
Oriental romance are large ingredients in the poem, 
but its men and women are drawn by a master's hand 
from the actual life; and, since in the two thousand 
years between our own and Homer's day nothing has 
changed so little as human nature, therefore very much 
of it is still a story of to-day. 

The poem before us is the tale of the wanderings and 
adventures of Odysseus — or Ulysses, as the softer tongue 
of the Latins preferred to call him — on his way home 
from the siege of Troy to his island-kingdom of Ithaca. 
The name Odysseus has been variously interpreted. 
Homer himself, who should be the best authority, tells 
us that it was given to him by his grandfather Autoly- 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

cus to signify " the child of hate." Others have inter- 
preted it to mean "suffering;" and some ingenious 
scholars see in it only the ancient form of a familiar 
sobriquet by which the hero was known, "the little 
one," or "the dwarf," — a conjecture which derives some 
support from the fact that the Tyrrhenians knew him 
under that designation. > It may be remembered that in 
the Iliad he is described as bearing no comparison in 
stature with the stalwart forms of Agamemnon and 
Menelaus; and it is implied in the description that 
there was some want of proportion in his figure, since 
he appeared nobler than Menelaus when both sat down. 
But in the Odyssey itself there appears no reference 
to any natural defect of any kind. His character in 
this poem corresponds perfectly with that which is dis- 
closed in the Iliad. There, he is the leading spirit of 
the Greeks when in council. Scarcely second to Achilles 
or Diomed in personal prowess, his advice and opinion 
are listened to with as much respect as those of the 
veteran Nestor. In the Iliad, too, he is, as he is called 
in the present poem, "the man of many devices." His 
accomplishments cover a larger field than those of any 
other hero. Achilles only can beat him in speed of foot ; 
he is as good an archer as Ajax Oileus or Teucer ; he 
throws Ajax the Great in the wrestling-match, in spite 
of his superior strength, by a happy use of science, and 
divides with him the prize of victory. To him, as the 
worthiest successor of Achilles — on the testimony of 
the Trojan prisoners, who declared that he had wrought 
them most harm of any — the armour of that great hero 
was awarded at his death. He is not tragic enough to 



4 HOMER. 

fill the first place in the Iliad, but we are quite prepared 
to find him the hero of a story of travel and adventure 
like the Odyssey, in which the grand figure of Achilles 
would be entirely out of place. 

The Odyssey has been pronounced, by a high classical 
authority, to be emphatically a lady's book. " The 
Iliad," says the great Bentley, " Homer made for men, 
and the Odyssey for the other sex." This opinion 
somewhat contradicts the criticism of an older and 
greater master — Aristotle — who defines the Odyssey as 
being " ethic and complex," while the Iliad is "pathetic 
and simple." Yet it was perhaps some such notion of 
the fitness of things which made Fenelon's adaptation 
of Homer's story, ' The Adventures of Telemachus in 
search of Ulysses,' so popular a French text-book in 
ladies' schools a century ago. It is certain, also, that 
the allusions in our modern literature, and the subjects 
of modern pictures, are drawn from the Odyssey even 
more frequently than from the Iliad, although the for- 
mer has never been so generally read in our schools and 
colleges. Circe and the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, 
have pointed more morals than any incidents in the 
Siege of Troy. Turner's pictures of Kausicaa and her 
Maidens, the Gardens of Alcinous,the Cyclops addressed 
by Ulysses, the Song of the Sirens — all amongst our 
national heirlooms of art — assume a fair acquaintance 
with the later Homeric fable on the part of the public 
for whom they were painted. The secret of this greater 
popularity may lie in the fact, that while the adventures 
in the Odyssey have more of the romantic and the 
imaginative, the heroes are less heroic — have more of 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

the common human type about them — than those of 
the Iliad. The colossal figure of Achilles in his wrath 
does not affect us so nearly as the wandering voyager 
with his strange adventures, his hairbreadth escapes, 
and his not over-scrupulous devices. 

To our English sympathies the Odyssey appeals 
strongly for another reason — it is a tale of voyage and 
discovery. " It is," as Dean Alford says, " of all poems 
a poem of the sea." In the Iliad the poet never missed 
an opportunity of letting us know that — whoever he 
was and wherever he was born — he knew the sea well, 
and had a seaman's tastes. But there his tale confined 
him chiefly to the plain before Troy, and such opportu- 
nities presented themselves but rarely. In the Odyssey 
we roam from sea to sea throughout the narrative, and 
the restless hero seems never so much at home as when 
he is on shipboard. It is not without reason that the 
most ancient works of art which bear the figure of 
Ulysses represent him not as a warrior but as a sailor. 

The Tale of Troy, as has been already said, embraces 
in its whole range three decades of years. It is with 
the last ten that the Odyssey has to do ; and as in the 
Iliad, though the siege itself had consumed ten years, 
it is with the last year only that the poet deals ; so in 
this second great poem also, the main action occupies 
no more than the last six weeks of the third and con- 
cluding decade. 

Between the Iliad and the Odyssey there is an in- 
terval of events, not related in either poem, but which 
a Greek audience of the poet's own day would readily 
supply for themselves out of a store of current legend 



6 HOMER. 

quite familiar to their minds, and embodied in more 
than one ancient poem now lost to us.* Troy, after 
the long siege, had fallen at last ; but not to Achilles. 
Tor him the dying prophecy of Hector had been soon ful- 
filled, and an arrow from the bow of Paris had stretched 
him in death, like his noble enemy, " before the Scsean 
gates." It was his son Neoptolemus, " the red-haired," 
to whom the oracles pointed as the destined captor of 
the city. Ulysses went back to Greece to fetch him, 
and even handed over to the young hero, on his 
arrival, the armour of his father — his own much- 
valued prize. In that armour Neoptolemus led the 
Greeks to the storm and sack of the city by night, 
while the Trojans were either asleep or holding deep 
carousal. 

It has been conjectured by some that, under the 
name of Ulysses, the poet has but described, with more 
or less of that licence to which he had a double claim 
as poet and as traveller, his own wanderings and adven- 
tures by land and sea. It has been argued, in a 
treatise of some ingenuity, t that the poet, whoever he 
was, was himself a native of the island in which he 
places the home of his hero. There is certainly one 
passage which reads very much like the circumstantial 
and loving description which a poet would give of his 
sea-girt birthplace, with every nook of which he would 
have been familiar from his childhood. It occurs in 
the scene where Ulysses is at last landed on the coast 

* See Iliad, p. 143. 

+ Ulysses Homer ; or, a Discovery of the True Author of the 
Iliad and Odyssey. By Constantine Koliades. 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

of Ithaca, which, he is slow to recognise until his divine 
guide points out to him the different localities within 
sight : — 

" This is the port of sea-king Phorcys old, 
And this the olive at the haven's brow. 
Yonder the deep dark lovely cave behold, 
Shrine of the Naiad-nymphs ! These shades enfold 
The stone-roofed bower, wherein thou oft hast stood, 
While to the Nymphs thy frequent vows uprolled, 
Steam of choice hecatombs and offerings good. 
Neritus hill stands there, high-crowned with waving wood." * 

As conjecture only all such theories must remain ; but 
it may at least be safely believed that the author had 
himself visited some of the strange lands which he 
describes, with whatever amount of fabulous ornament 
he may have enriched his tale, and it has a certain 
interest for the reader to entertain the possibility of 
a personal narrative thus underlying the romance. 

* B. xiii. 345 (st. 45, Worsley). 



THE ODYSSEY. 



CHAPTEE I. 

PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 

The surviving heroes of the great expedition against 
Troy, after long wanderings, have at length reached 
their homes, with one exception — Ulysses has not 
been heard of in his island-kingdom of Ithaca. Ten 
years have nearly passed since the fall of Troy, ami 
still his wife Penelope, and his aged father Laertes, 
and his yonng son Telemachus, now growing up to 
manhood, keep weary watch for the hero's return. 
There is, moreover, a twofold trouble in the house. 
It is not only anxiety for an absent husband, but the 
perplexity caused by a crowd of importunate suitors 
for her hand, which vexes the soul of Penelope from 
day to day. The young nobles of Ithaca and its de- 
pendent islands have for many years nocked to the 
palace to seek the hand of her whom they consider as 
virtually a widowed queen. It is to no purpose that 



10 TEE ODYSSEY. 

she professes her own. firm belief that Ulysses still 
survives : she has no kind of proof of his existence, 
and the suitors demand of her that — in accordance 
with what would appear the custom of the country — 
she shall make choice of some one among them to take 
the lost hero's place, and enjoy all the rights of sove- 
reignty. How far the lovers were attracted by the 
wealth and position of the lady, and how far by the 
force of her personal charms, is a point somewhat hard 
to decide. The Roman poet Horace imputes to them 
the less romantic motive. They were, he says, of that 
class of prudent wooers — 

" Who prized good living more than ladies' love ; " 

and he even liints that Penelope's knowledge of their 
real sentiments helped to account for her obduracy. 
But Horace, we must remember, was a satirist by trade. 
A mere prosaic reader might be tempted to raise the 
question whether the personal charms of Penelope, 
irresistible as they might have been when Ulysses 
first left her for the war, must not have been somewhat 
impaired during the twenty years of his absence ; and 
whether it was possible for a widow of that date 
(especially with a grown-up son continually present as 
a memento) to inspire such very ardent admiration. 
These arithmetical critics have always been the pests 
of poetry. One very painstaking antiquarian — Jacob 
Bryant — in the course of his studies on the Iliad, 
made the discovery, by a comparison of mythological 
dates, that Helen herself must have been nearly a 
hundred yaars old at the taking of Troy. But the 



PEXELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 11 

question of age has been unanimously voted imperti- 
nent by all her modern admirers : she still shines in 
our fancy with 

" The starlike beauty of immortal eyes " 

which the Laureate saw in his ' Dream of Fair Women.' 
The heroic legends take no count of years. "Woman 
is there beautiful by divine right of sex, unless in 
those few special instances in which, for the purposes 
of the story, particular persons are necessarily repre- 
sented as old and decrepit. Nor is there any ground 
for supposing that the suitors of Penelope, like the 
courtiers of Queen Elizabeth, persisted in attributing 
to her fictitious charms. She is evidently not less 
beautiful in the poet's eyes than in theirs. As beauty 
has been happily said to be, after all, " the lover's 
gift," so also the bestowal of it upon whom he will 
must be allowed to be the privilege of the poet. The 
island-queen herself says, indeed, that her beauty had 
fled when Ulysses left her, and could only be restored 
by his return ; but this disclaimer from the lips of a 
loving and mourning wife only makes her more charm- 
ing, and she is not the only woman, ancient or 
modern, who has borrowed an additional fascination 
from her tears. 

The suitors of Penelope, strange to say, are living 
at free quarters in the palace of the absent Ulysses. 
Telemachus is too young, apparently, to assert his 
rights as master of the house on his own or his 
mother's behalf. If the picture be true to the life — 
and there is no good reason to suppose it otherwise — 



12 THE ODYSSEY. 

we must assume an age of rude licence even in the 
midst of considerable civilisation, when, unless a king 
or chief could hold his own by the strong hand, there 
was small chance of his rights being respected. A 
partial explanation may also lie in the fact that the 
wealth of the king was regarded as in some sort pub- 
lic property, and that to keep open house for all 
whose rank entitled them to sit at his table was pro- 
bably a popular branch of the royal prerogative. Te- 
lemachus is an only son, and he and his mother have 
apparently no near kinsmen to avenge any wrong or 
insult that may be offered. There is, besides, some- 
what of weakness and tameness in his character, more 
than befits the son of such a father. He is a home- 
nurtured youth, of a gentle and kindly nature, a duti- 
ful and affectionate son ; but his temperament is far 
too easy for the rude and troublous times in which 
his lot is cast, and the roystering crew who profess at 
least to be the wooers of Penelope have not been slow 
to find it out. Some kindly critics (" Christopher 
j^orth" among the number) have refused to see any of 
these shortcomings in the young prince's character ; 
but his father Ulysses saw them plainly. For thus it 
is he speaks, at a later period of the tale, under his 
disguise of a mendicant : — 



" Had I but youth as I have heart, or were 
The blameless brave Ulysses, or his son, 
Then let a stranger strike me headless there, 
If against any I leave revenge undone ! " 



But this is anticipating somewhat too much. We 
must return to the opening of the poem. 






PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 13 

The fate of Ulysses, so far as any knowledge of it 
has reached his wife and son, lies yet in mystery. 
Only the gods know — and perhaps it were as well for 
Penelope not to know — in what unworthy thraldom 
he is held. He has incurred the anger of the great 
Sea-god, and therefore he is still forbidden to reach 
his home. He has lain captive now for seven long 
years in Ogygia, the enchanted realm of Calypso — 

" Girded of ocean in an island-keep, 
An island clothed with trees, the navel of the deep. 

" There dwells the child of Atlas, who can sound 
All seas, and eke doth hold the pillars tall 
Which keep the skies asunder from the ground. 
There him, still sorrowing, she doth aye enthral, 
Weaving serene enticements to forestal 
The memory of his island-realm." 

But the goddess of wisdom, who was his protecting 
genius throughout the perils of the great siege, and by 
whose aid, as we have seen in the Iliad, he has dis- 
tanced so many formidable competitors in the race for 
glory, has not forgotten her favourite. The opening 
scene of the Odyssey shows us the gods in council 
on Olympus. Neptune alone is absent ; he is gone to 
feast, like Jupiter in the Iliad, with, those mysterious 
people, the far-off ^Ethiopians — 

" Extreme of men, who diverse ways retire, 
Some to the setting, some the rising sun." 

Minerva takes -the opportunity of his absence to 
remind the Father of the gods of the hard fate of 
Ulysses, so unworthy of a hero who has deserved so 



14 THE ODYSSEY. 

well both, of gods and men. It is agreed to send 
Mercury, the messenger of the Immortals, to the 
island where Calypso holds Ulysses captive in her 
toils, to announce to him that the day of his return 
draws near. Minerva herself, meanwhile, will go to ! 
Ithaca, and put strength into the heart of his son 
Telemachus, that he may rid his house of this hateful 
brood of revellers, and set forth to make search for his 
father. The passage- in which the poet describes her 
visit is a fine one, and it has been finely rendered by 
Mr Worsley : — 

" So ending, underneath her feet she bound 
Her faery sandals of ambrosial gold, 
Which o'er the waters and the solid ground 
Swifter than wind have borne her from of old ; 
Then on the iron-pointed spear laid hold, 
Heavy and tall, wherewith she smites the brood 
Of heroes till her anger waxes cold ; 
Then from Olympus swept in eager mood, 
And with the island-people in the court she stood 

" Fast by the threshold of the outer gate 
Of brave Odysseus : in her hand she bore 
The iron-pointed spear, heavy and great, 
And, waiting as a guest-friend at the door, 
Of Mentes, Taphian chief, the likeness wore ; 
There found the suitors, who beguiled with play 
The hours, and sat the palace-gates before 
On hides of oxen which themselves did slay — 
Haughty of mien they sat, and girt with proud array." 

As the young prince sits thus, an unwilling host in 
his father's hall, meditating, says the poet, whether 
or no some day that father may return suddenly and 
take vengeance on these invaders of his rights, against 
whom he himself seems powerless, he lifts his eyes 



PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 15 

and sees a stranger standing at the gate. With simple 
and high-bred courtesy — the courtesy of the old Bible 
patriarchs, and even now practised by the Orientals, 
though the march of modern civilisation has left little 
remnant of it in our western isles — he hastes to bid 
the stranger welcome, on the simple ground that he is 
a stranger, and will hear no word of his errand until 
the rights of hospitality have been paid. Eager as he 
is to hear possible news of his father, he restrains his 
anxiety to question his guest. Not until the hand- 
maidens have brought w r ater in the silver ewers, and 
the herald, and the carver, and the dame of the pantry 
(it is a right royal establishment, if somewhat rude) 
have each done their office to supply the stranger's 
wants, does Telemachus ask him a single question. 
But when the suitors have ended their feast, they call 
for music and song. They compel Phemius, the house- 
hold bard, to make mirth for them. Then, while he 
plies his voice and lyre for their entertainment, the 
son of Ulysses whispers aside with his visitor. Who 
is he, and whence does he come ? Is he a friend of 
his father's % "For many a guest, and none unwelcome, 
had come to those halls, as the son well knows, in his 
day. Above all, does he bring news of him? Then 
the disguised goddess tells her story, with a circumstan- 
tial minuteness of invention which befits wisdom when 
she condescends to falsehood : — 



" Know, my name is hight 
Mentes, the son of brave Anchialus, 
And sea-famed Taphos is my regal right ; 
And with my comrades am I come to-night 



16 TEE ODYSSEY. 

Hither, in sailing o'er the wine-dark sea 
To men far off, who stranger tongues indite. 
For copper am I bound to Teniese, 
And in my bark I bring sword-steel along with me. 

" Moored is my ship beyond the city walls, 
Under the wooded cape, within the bay. 
We twain do boast, each in the other's halls, 
Our fathers' friendship from an ancient day. 
Hero Laertes ask, and he will say. " 

But of Ulysses' present fate the guest declares he 
knows nothing ; only he has a presentiment that he 
is detained somewhere in an unwilling captivity, but 
that, " though he be bound with chains of iron," he 
will surely find his way home again. But in any case, 
as his father's friend, the supposed Mentes bids Te- 
lemachus take heart and courage, and act manfully for 
himself. Let him give this train of riotous suitors fair 
warning to quit the palace, and waste his substance no 
more • let his mother Penelope go back to her own 
father's house (if she desires to wed again), and make 
her choice and hold her wedding-banquet there ; and 
for his own part, let him at once set sail and make 
inquiry for his father round the coasts of Greece. It 
may be that Nestor of Pylos, or Menelaus of Sparta — 
the last returned of the chiefs of the expedition — can 
give him some tidings. If he can only hear that 
Ulysses is yet alive, then he may well endure to wait 
his return with patience ; if assured of his death, it 
will befit him to take due vengeance on these his 
enemies. The divine visitor even hints a reproach 
of Telemachus' present inactivity: — 



PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 17 

" No more, with thews like these, to weakness cling. 
Hast thon not heard divine Orestes' fame, 
Who slew the secret slayer of the king 
His father, and achieved a noble name ? 
Thon also, friend, to thine own strength lay claim — 
Comely thon art and tall — that men may speak 
Thy prowess, and their children speak the same.'' 

The young prince duteously accepts the counsel, as 
from his father's friend, and prays his guest to tarry 
a while. But Minerva, her mission accomplished, sud- 
denly changes her shape, spreads wings, and van- 
ishes. Then Telemachus recognises the goddess, and 
feels a new life and spirit born within him. If we 
choose to admit an allegorical interpretation — more 
than commonly tempting, as must be confessed, in this 
particular case — it is the advent of Wisdom and Dis- 
cretion to the conscious heart of the youth, hitherto 
too little awakened to its responsibilities. 

Telemachus returns to his place among the revellers 
a new man. They are still listening to the minstrel, 
Phemius, who chants a lay of the return of the Greek 
chiefs from Troy, and the sufferings inflicted on them 
during their homeward voyage by the vengeance of the 
gods. The sound reaches Penelope where she sits apart 
with her wise maidens, like the mother of Sisera, in her 
r upper chamber " — the " bower" of the ladies of medi- 
seval chivalry. She comes down the stair, and stands 
on the threshold of the banqueting-hall, attracted by 
the song. But the subject is too painful. She calls 
the bard to her, and begs him, for her sake, to choose 
some other theme. We must not be too angry with 
Telemachus because, in the first flush of his newly- 

a. c. vol. ii. B 



18 THE ODYSSEY. 

awakened sense of the responsibilities of his position, 
he uses language, in addressing his mother, which to 
our ears has a sound of harshness and reproach. He 
bids her not presume to set limits to the inspiration of 
the bard — the noblest theme is ever the best. He 
reminds her that woman's kingdom is the loom and 
the distaff, and that the rule over men in his father's 
house now belongs to him. Viewed with reference to 
the tone of the age as regarded the duties of women, — 
compared with the parting charge of Hector in the 
Iliad to the wife he loved so tenderly, and even with 
a higher example in Scripture, — there is nothing start- 
ling or repulsive in such language from a son to his 
mother. To the young prince in his new mood, while 
the counsels of Minerva were yet ringing in his ears, 
the absence and the sufferings of his father might well 
seem the only theme on which he could endure to hear 
the minstrel descant ; it was of this, he feels, that he 
needed to be continually reminded. And if hitherto 
he has allowed this riotous company to assume that, in 
the absence of Ulysses, the government of his house 
has rested in the weak hands of a woman, it shall be 
so no longer. He will take his father's place. 

The mother sees the change in her son's temper 
with some surprise — we may suppose, with somewhat 
mingled feelings of approval and mortification. The 
boy has grown into a man on the sudden. The poet 
gives us but a single word as any clue to the effect 
upon Penelope of this evidently unaccustomed out- 
burst of self-assertion on the part of Telemachus. 
<; Astonished," he says, she withdraws at once to her 



PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 19 

upper chamber, and there weeps her sorrows to sleep. 
Telemachus himself addresses the assembled company 
in a tone which is evidently as new to their ears as to 
those of his mother. He bids them, with a haughty 
courtesy, feast their fill to-night ; to-morrow he will 
summon (as is the custom of the Homeric princes) a 
council of the heads of the people, and there he will 
give them all public warning to quit his father's house, 
and feast — if they needs must feast — in each other's 
houses, at their own cost. If they refuse, and still 
make this riot of an absent man's wealth, he appeals 
from men to " the gods who live for ever " for a sure 
and speedy vengeance. 

The careless revellers mark the change in the young 
man as instantly as Penelope. Tor a few moments 
they bite their lips in silence — " wondering that he 
spake so bold." The first to answer him is Antinous, 
the most prominent ringleader of the confraternity of 
suitors. His character is very like that of the worst 
stamp of the " Cavalier" of the days of our own Charles 
II. Brave, bold, and insolent, there is yet a reckless 
gaiety and a ready wit about him which would have 
made him at once a favourite in that unprincipled 
court. He adds to these characteristics a quality of 
which he might, unhappily, have also found a high 
example there — that of ingratitude. He is bound by 
strong ties of obligation to the house of Ulysses ; his 
father had come in former days to seek an asylum with 
! the Chief of Ithaca from the vengeance of the Thes- 
protians, and had been kindly entertained by him 
until his death. The son now answers Telemachus 



20 THE ODYSSEY. 

with a taunting compliment upon the new character in 
which he has just come out. " He means to claim for 
himself the sovereignty of the island, as his father's 
heir, no doubt ; but the gods forbid that Ithaca should 
ever come under the rule of so fierce a despot !" 
Telemachus makes answer that he will at all events 
rule his father's house. Upon this, Eurynomus, an- 
other leading spirit among the rivals — a smoother- 
tongued and more cautious individual — soothes the 
angry youth with what seems a plausible recognition 
of his rights, in order that he may get an answer to a 
question on which he feels an interest not unmixed, 
as Ave may easily understand, with some secret appre- 
hension. "Who was this traveller from over sea? 
and — did he happen to bring any news of Ulysses 1 " 
Eut Telemachus has learnt subtlety as well as wisdom 
from the disguised goddess. He gives the name as- 
sumed by his visitor, Mentes, an old friend of the 
house. Eut as to his father's return, the oracles of 
the gods and the reports of men all agree in pronounc- 
ing it to have now become hopeless. So the revel is 
renewed till nightfall ■ and while the feasters go off 
to their own quarters somewhere near at hand, Tele- 
machus retires to. his chamber (separate, apparently, 
from the main building), where his old nurse Eurycleia 
tends him with a careful affection, as though he were 
still a child, folding and hanging up the vest of fine 
linen which he takes off when he lies down to sleep, 
and drawing the bolt of the chamber door through its 
silver ring when she leaves him. 

The council of notables is summoned for the morrow. 



PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 21 

JSTo such meeting has been held since the departure of 
Ulysses for Troy. As Telemachus passes to take his 
place there, all men remark a new majesty in his looks. 

" So when the concourse to the full was grown, 
He lifted in his hand the steely spear, 
And to the council moved, but not alone, 
For as he walked his swift dogs followed near. 
Also Minerva did with grace endear 
His form, that all the people gazed intent 
And wondered, while he passed without a peer. 
Straight to his father's seat his course he bent, 
And the old men gave way in reverence as he went." 

He makes his passionate protest before them all 
against the insufferable waste of his household by this 
crew of revellers, and against their own supineness 
in offering him no aid to dislodge them. Antinous 
rises to answer him, beginning, as before, with an 
ironical compliment — " the young orator's language is 
as sublime as his spirit." But the fault, he begs to 
assure him, lies not with the suitors, but with the queen 
herself. She has been playing fast and loose with her 
lovers, deluding them, for these three years past, with 
vain hopes and false promises. She had, indeed, been 
practising a kind of pious fraud upon them. She had 
set up a mighty loom, in which she wrought diligently 
to complete, as she professed, a winding-sheet of deli- 
cate texture for her husband's father, the aged Laertes, 
against the day of his death. Not until this sad task 
was finished, she entreated of them, let her be asked to 
choose a new bridegroom. To so much forbearance 
they had all assented ; but lo ! they had lately dis- 
covered that what she wrought by day she carefully 



22 THE ODYSSEY. 

unwound by night, so that the task promised to be an 
endless one. Some of the handmaidens (who had 
found their own lovers, too, amongst their royal mis- 
tress's many suitors) had betrayed her secret. Antinous 
is gallant enough to add to this recital of Penelope's 
craft warm praises of the queen herself, even giving 
her full credit for the bright woman's wit which had so 
long baffled them all. 

" Matchless skill 
To weave the splendid web ; sagacious thought, 
And shrewdness such as never fame ascribed 
To any beauteous Greek of ancient days, 
Tyro, Mycene, or Alcmene, loved 
Of Jove himself, all whom th' accomplished queen 
Transcends in knowledge— ignorant alone 
That, wooed long time, she should at last be won." — (Cowper.) 

Eut they will now be put off no longer — she must 
make her choice, or they will never leave the house so 
long as she remains there unespoused. Telemachus 
indignantly refuses to send his mother home to her 
father ; and repeats his passionate appeal to the gods 
for vengeance against the wrongs which he is himself 
helpless to deal with. At once an omen from heaven 
seems to betoken that the appeal is heard and accepted. 
Two eagles are seen flying over the heads of the crowd 
assembled in the marketplace, where they suddenly 
wheel round, and tear each other furiously with beak 
and talons. The soothsayer is at hand to interpret ; the 
aged Halitherses, who reminds them all how he had 
foretold, when Ulysses first left his own shores for 
Troy, the twenty years that would elapse before his 
return. Now, he sees by this portent, the happy day is 



PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 23 

near at hand ; nay, in his zeal for his master's house- 
he goes so far as to urge the assembled people to take 
upon themselves at once the punishment of these 
traitors. One of the suitors mocks at the old man's 
auguries, and threatens him for his interference. The 
prophet is silenced • and Telemachus, finding no sup- 
port from the assembly, asks but for a ship and crew to 
be furnished him, that he may set forth in search of his 
father. One indignant voice, among the apathetic' 
crowd, is raised in the young prince's defence : it is 
that of Mentor, to whom Ulysses had intrusted the 
guardianship of his rights in his absence. His name 
has passed into a synonym for all prudent guardians 
and moral counsellors, chiefly in consequence of Fene- 
lon's didactic tale of ' Telemaque,' already mentioned, 
in which the adventures of the son of Ulysses were 
" improved," with elaborate morals, for the benefit of 
youth ; and in which Mentor, as the young prince's 
travelling tutor, played a conspicuous part. He vents 
his indignation here in a very striking protest against 
popular ingratitude : — 

" Hear ine, ye Ithacans ; — be never king 
From this time forth benevolent, humane, 
Or righteous ; bnt let every sceptred hand 
Enle merciless, and deal in wrong alone ; 
Since none of all his people, whom he swayed 
With such paternal gentleness and love, 
Eemembers the divine Ulysses more."— (Cow per.) 

He, too, meets with jeers and mockery from the inso- 
lent nobles, and Telemachus quits the assembly to 
wander in melancholy mood along the sea-shore — the 



24 THE ODYSSEY. 

usual resort, it will be remarked, of the Homeric heroes, 
when they seek to calm the tumult of grief or anger. 
Such appeal to the soothing influence of what Homer 
calls the " illimitable " ocean is not less true to nature 
than it is characteristic of the poetical and imaginative 
temperament. Bathing his hands in the sea waves — 
for prayer, to the Greek as to the Hebrew mind, de- 
manded a preparatory purification — Telemachus lifts 
his cry to his guardian goddess, Minerva. At once 
she stands before him there in the likeness of Mentor. 
She speaks to him words of encouragement and counsel. 
Evil men may mock at him now ; but if he be deter- 
mined to prove himself the true son of such a father, 
he shall not lack honour in the end. She will provide 
him ship and crew for his voyage. Thus encouraged 
by the divine Wisdom which speaks in the person of 
Mentor, he returns to the banquet-hall, to avoid sus- 
picion. Yet, when Antinous greets him there with a 
mocking show of friendship, he wrenches his hand 
roughly from his grasp, and quits the company. Taking 
into his counsels his nurse Eurycleia — who is the palace 
housekeeper also — he bids her make ready good store 
of provisions for his voyage : twelve capacious vessels 
filled with the ripest wine, twenty measures of fine meal, 
and grain besides, carefully sewn up in wallets. In the 
dusk of this very evening, unknown to his mother, he 
will embark ; for the goddess (still in Mentor's likeness) 
has chartered for him a galley with twenty stout rowers, 
which is to lie ready launched for him in' the harbour 
at nightfall. Eurycleia vainly remonstrates with her 
nursling on his dangerous purpose — 



PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS. 25 

" ' Ah ! bide with thine own people here at ease. 
There is no call to suffer useless pain, 
Wandering always on the barren seas.' 
But he : e Good nurse, prithee take heart again, 
These things are not without a god nor vain. 
Swear only that my mother shall not know 
Till twelve days pass, or she herself be fain 
To ask thee, or some other the tidings show, 
Lest her salt tears despoil much loveliness with woe.' " 

Telemachus's resolve is fixed. As soon as the sha- 
dows of evening fall, Minerva sends a strange drowsi- 
ness on the assembled revellers in the hall of Ulysses, 
so that the wine-cups drop from their hands, and they 
stagger off early to their couches. Then, in the person 
of Mentor, she summons Telemachus to where the 
galley lies waiting for him, guides him on board, and 
takes her place beside him in the stern. 

" Loud and clear 
Sang the bluff Zephyr o'er the wine-dark mere 
Behind them. By Athene's hest he blew. 
Telemachus his comrades on did cheer 
To set the tackling. With good hearts the crew 
Heard him, and all things ranged in goodly order true. 

" The olive mast, planted with care, they bind 
With ropes, the white sails stretch on twisted hide, 
And brace the mainsail to the bellying wind. 
Loudly the keel rushed through the seething tide. 
Soon as the good ship's gear was all applied, 
They ranged forth bowls crowned with dark wine, and poured 
To gods who everlastingly abide, 
Most to the stern-eyed child of heaven's great lord. 
All night the ship clave onward till the Dawn upsoared.'* 



CHAPTEK II. 

TELEMACHUS GOES IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 

Hitherto, and throughout the first four books of the 
poem, Teleroachus, and not Ulysses, is the hero of the 
tale. The voyagers soon reach the rocky shores of 
Pylos,* the stronghold of the old " horse-tamer," Nestor. 
He has survived the long campaign in which so many 
of his younger comrades fell, and is now sitting, sur- 
rounded by his sons, at a great public banquet held in 
honour of the Sea-god. Telemachus, with a natural 
modesty not unbecoming his youth, is at first reluctant 
to accost and question a chieftain so full of years and 
renown, and his attendant guardian has to reassure him 
by the promise that " heaven will put words into his 
mouth." There is no need of question yet, however, 
either on the side of hosts or guests. Pisistratus, the 
youngest son of Nestor, upon whom the duties of 
" guest-master " naturally fall, welcomes the travellers 
with the invariable courtesy accorded by the laws of 
Homeric society to all strangers as their right, bids 
them take a seat at the banquet, and proffers the wine- 

* Probably the modern Coryphasium. 



TELEMACHUS IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 27 

cup — to the supposed Mentor first, as the elder. He 
only requests of them, before they drink, to join their 
hosts in their public supplication to Neptune ; for he 
will not do them the injustice to suppose prayer can be 
unknown or distasteful to them, be they who they 
may — "All men have need of prayer." When the 
prayer has been duly made by both for a blessing on 
their hosts and for their own safe return, and when 
they have eaten and drunk to their hearts' content, 
then, and not till then, Nestor inquires their errand. 
The form in which the old chief put his question is as 
strongly characteristic of a primitive civilisation as the 
open hospitality which has preceded it. He asks the 
voyagers, in so many words, whether they are pirates ? 
— not for a moment implying that such an occupation 
would be to their discredit. The freebooters of the 
sea in the Homeric times were dangerous enough, but 
not disreputable. It was an iron age, when every 
man's hand was more or less against his neighbour, 
and the guest of to-day might be an enemy to-morrow. 
Nestor's downright question may help a modern reader 
to understand the waste of Ulysses' substance in his 
absence by the lawless spirits of Ithaca. It was only 
so long as " the strong man armed kept his palace " in 
person that his goods were in peace. Telemachus, in 
reply, declares his name and errand, and implores the 
old chieftain, in remembrance of the days when he and 
Ulysses fought side by side at Troy, to give him, if he 
can, some tidings of his father. 

" Answered him Nestor, the Gerenian knight : 
' Friend, thon remind'st me of exceeding pain, 



28 THE ODYSSEY. 

Which we, the Achaians of unconquered might, 
There, and in ships along the clouded main, 
Led by Achillens to the spoil, did drain, 
With those our fightings round the fortress high 
Of Priam king. There all our best were slain — 
There the brave Aias and Achilleus lie ; 
Patroclus there, whose wisdom matched the gods on high. 

" ' There too Antilochus my son doth sleep, 
Who in his strength was all so void of blame — 
Swift runner, and staunch warrior.' " 

Nestor shows the same love of story-telling which 
marks his character in the Iliad. Modern critics who 
are inclined to accuse the old chief of garrulity should 
remember that, in an age in which there were no daily 
newspapers with their " special correspondents," a good 
memory and a fluent tongue were very desirable quali- 
fications of old age. The old campaigner in his retire- 
ment was the historian of his own times. Unless he 
told his story often and at length amongst the men of 
a younger generation when they met at the banquet, 
all memory of the gallant deeds of old would be lost, 
and even the professional bard would have lacked the 
data on which to build his lay. Many a Nestor must 
have been ready — in season and out of season — to 

" Shoulder his crutch, and show how fields were won," 

before any Homer could have sung oi the Trojan war. 
Even now, we are ready to listen readily to the veter- 
an's reminiscences of a past generation, whether in war 
or peace, who has a retentive memory and a pleasant 
style — only he now commonly tells his story in print. 
Nestor proceeds to tell his guests how the gods, 
after Troy was taken, had stirred up strife between 



TELEMACHUS IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 29 

the "brother - kings Agamemnon and Menelaus ; and 
how, in consequence, the fleet had divided, Menelaus 
with one division sailing straight for home, while the 
rest had waited with Agamemnon in the hope of ap- 
peasing the wrath of heaven. Ulysses, who had at 
first set sail with Menelaus, had turned back and re- 
joined his leader. Of his subsequent fate Nestor 
knows nothing; but he bids the young man take 
courage. He has heard of the troubles that beset him 
at home; but if Minerva vouchsafes to the son the 
love and favour which (as was known to all the Greeks) 
she bore to his father, all will go well with him yet. 
Neither Nestor nor Telemachus are aware (though the 
reader is) that the Wisdom which had made Ulysses a 
great name was even now guiding the steps of his son. 
One thing yet the youth longs to hear from the lips of 
Ins father's ancient friend — the terrible story of Aga- 
memnon's death by the hands of his wife and her para- 
mour, and the vengeance taken by his son Orestes. It 
is a tale which he has heard as yet but darkly, but has 
dwelt upon in his heart ever since the goddess, at her 
visit under the shape of Mentes, made such significant 
reference to the story. Nestor tells it now at length — 
the bloody legend which, variously shaped, became the 
theme of the poet and the dramatist from generation 
to generation of Greek literature. In Homer's version 
we miss some of the horrors which later writers wove 
into the tale ; and it is not unlikely that, in the simpler 
form in which it is here given, we have the main facts 
of an actual domestic tragedy. During Agamemnon's 
long absence in the Trojan war, his queen Clytemnes- 



30 TEE ODYSSEY. 

tra, sister of Helen, had been seduced from her marriage 
faith by her husband's cousin iEgisthus. In vain had 
the household bard, faithful to the trust committed to 
him by his lord in his absence, counselled and warned 
his lady against the peril; and iEgisthus at last, hopeless 
of his object so long as she had these honest eyes upon 
her, had caused him to be carried to a desert island to 
perish with hunger. So she fell, and iEgisthus ruled 
palace and kingdom. At last Agamemnon returned 
from the weary siege, and, landing on the shore of his 
kingdom, knelt down and kissed the soil in a transport 
of joyful tears. It is probably with no conscious imi- 
tation, but merely from the correspondence of the poet's 
mind, that Shakespeare attributes the very same expres- 
sion of feeling to his Eichard II. : — 

" I weep for joy 
To stand upon my kingdom once again. 
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand, 
Though rebels wound thee with their horses' hoofs : 
As a long-parted mother with her child 
Plays fondly with her tears, and smiles in meeting, 
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, 
And do thee favour with my royal hands." 

Agamemnon meets with as tragical a reception from the 
usurper of his rights as did Eichard Plantagenet : — 

" Many the warm tears from his eyelids shed, 
When through the mist of his long-hoped delight 
He saw the lovely land before him spread. 
Him from high watch-tower marked the watchman wight 
Set by iEgisthus to watch day and night, 
Two talents of pure gold his promised hire. 
Twelve months he watched, lest the Avenger light 
Unheeded, and remember his old fire ; 
Then to his lord made haste to show the tidings dire. 



TELEMACHUS IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 31 

" Forthwith iEgisthus, shaping a dark snare, 
Score of his bravest chose, and ambush set, 
And bade rich banquets close at hand prepare. 
Then he with horses and with chariots met 
The king, and welcomed him with fair words, yet 
With fraud at heart, and to the feast him led ; 
There, like a stalled ox, smote him while he fed." 

For seven years the adulterer and usurper reigned in 
security at Mycense. But meanwhile the boy Orestes, 
stolen away from, the guilty court by his elder sister, 
was growing up to manhood, the destined avenger of 
blood, at Athens. In the seventh year he came back 
in disguise to his father's house, slew iEgisthus, and 
recovered his inheritance. There was a darker shadow 
still thrown over Agamemnon's death by later poets, 
which finds no place in Homer. The tragic interest 
in the dramas of iEschylus and Sophocles, which are 
founded on this story, lies in their representing Clytem- 
nestra herself as the murderess of her husband, and 
Orestes, as his father's avenger, not hesitating to be- 
come the executioner of his mother as well as of her 
paramour. 

JSTestor has finished his story, and the travellers offer 
to return to their vessel and continue their quest ; but 
the old chieftain will not hear of it. That night, at 
least, they must remain as his guests — on the morrow 
he will send them on to the court of Menelaus at 
Sparta, where they may chance to learn the latest tid- 
ings of Ulysses. Telemachus's guardian bids him 
accept the invitation, then suddenly spreads wings, and 
takes to flight in the likeness of a sea- eagle ; and both 
Xestor and Telemachus recognise at last that, in the 



32 THE ODYSSEY. 

shape of Mentor, the goddess of wisdom has been so 
long his guide. A sacrifice is forthwith offered in her 
honour — a heifer, with horns overlaid with gold; a 
public banquet is held as before, and then, according 
to promise, Telemachus is sped on his journey. A 
pair of swift and strong-limbed horses — the old chief 
knew what a good horse was, and charged his sons 
specially to take the best in his stalls — are harnessed 
for the journey, and good provision of corn and wine, 
" such as was fit for princes," stored in the chariot. 
Pisistratus himself mounts beside his new friend as 
driver. Their first day's stage is Pherse, where they 
are hospitably entertained by Xestor's friend, Diodes | 
and, after driving all the following day, they reach the 
palace gates of Menelaus, in Sparta, when the sun has 
set upon the yellow harvest fields, "and all the ways 
are dim." 

At Sparta, too, as at Pylos, the city is holding high 
festival on the evening of their arrival. A double 
marriage is being celebrated in the halls of Menelaus. 
Hermione, his sole child by Helen, is leaving her 
parents to become the bride of Xeoptolemus (otherwise 
known as Pyrrhus, the " red-haired"), son of the great 
Achilles ; and at the same time the young Megapenthes, 
Menelaus's son by a slave wife, is to be married in his 
father's house. There is music and dancing in the 
halls when the travellers arrive; but Menelaus, like 
Nestor, will ask no questions of the strangers until the 
bath, and food, and wine in plenty, have refreshed 
them, and their horses have good barley-meal and rye 
set before them in the mangers. The magnificence of 



TELEMACHUS IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 33 

Menelaus's palace, as described by the poet, is a very 
remarkable feature in the tale. It reads far more like 
a scene from the ' Arabian Mghts ' than a lay of early 
Greece. The lofty roofs fling back a flashing light as 
the travellers enter, " like as the splendour of the sun 
or moon." Gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and electrum, 
combine their brilliancy in the decorations. The guests 
wash in lavers of silver, and the water is poured from 
golden ewers. Telemachus is struck with wonder at 
the sight, and can compare it to nothing earthly. 

" Such and so glorious to celestial eyne 
Haply may gleam the Olympian halls divine ! " 

The palaces of Sparta, as seen in Homer's vision, con- 
trast remarkably with the estimate formed of them by 
the Greek historian of a later age. Thucydides speaks 
of the city as having no public buildings of any magni- 
ficence, such as would impress a stranger with an idea 

| of its real power, but wearing rather the appearance of 
a collection of villages. It is difficult to conceive that 
the actual Sparta of a much earlier age could have con- 
tained anything at all corresponding to this Homeric 

: ideal of splendour; and the question arises, whether 
we have here an indistinct record of an earlier and 

: extinct civilisation, or whether the poet drew an ima- 
ginary description from his own recollections of the 
gorgeous barbaric splendour of some city in the further 
East, which he had visited in his travels. If this be 
nothing more than a poet's exaggerated and idealised 
view of an actual state of higher civilisation, which 

'once really existed in the old Greek kingdoms, and 
a. c. vol. ii. c 



34 THE ODYSSEY, 

disappeared under the Dorian Heraclids, it is a singular 
record of a backward step in a nation's history ; and 
the Homeric poems become especially valuable as pre- 
serving the memorials of a state of society which would 
otherwise have passed altogether into oblivion. There 
is less difficulty in believing the possible existence of 
an ante-historical civilisation which afterwards became 
extinct, if we remember the splendours of Solomon's 
court, as to which the widespread traditions of the East 
only corroborate the records of Scripture, and all which 
passed away almost entirely with its founder. It is 
remarkable that in the ancient "Welsh poem, 6 Y Godo- 
din,' by Aneurin Owen, of which the supposed date is 
a.d. 570, there are very similar properties and scenery: 
knights in " armour of gold " and " purple plumes," 
mounted on " thick-maned chargers," with " golden 
spurs," who must — if ever they rode the Cambrian 
mountains — have been a very different race from the 
wild Welsh who held Edward Longshanks at bay. 
Are we to look upon this as merely the common 
language of all poets'? and, if so, how comes it to 
be common to all] Were the Welsh who fought in 
the half-mythical battle of Cattraeth as far superior, in 
the scale of civilisation, to their successors who fell at 
Conway, as the Spartans under Menelaus (if Homer's 
picture of them is to be trusted) were to the Spartans 
under Leonidas? or was there some remote original, 
Oriental or other, whence this ornate military imagery 
passed into the poetry of such very different nations ? 

So, too, when Helen — now restored to her place 
in Menelaus's household — comes forth to greet the 



TELEMACHUS IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 35 

strangers, her whole surroundings are rather those of 
an Eastern sultana than of any princess of Spartan race. 

" Forth from her fragrant chamber Helen passed 
Like gold-bowed Dian : and Adraste came 
The bearer of her throne's majestic frame ; 
Her carpet's fine-wrought fleece Alcippe bore, 
Phylo her basket bright with silver ore, 
Gift of the wife of Polybus, who swayed 
When Thebes, the Egyptian Thebes, scant wealth displayed. 
His wife Alcandra, from her treasured store, 
A golden spindle to fair Helen bore, 
And a bright silver basket, on whose round 
A rim of burnished gold was closely bound." — (Sotheby.) 






These elaborate preparations for her "work" — which 
is some delicate fabric of wool tinged with the costly- 
purple dye — have little in common with the household 
loom of Penelope. Here, as in the Iliad, refinement 
and elegance of taste are the distinctive characteristics 
of Helen : and they help to explain, though. they in no 
way excuse, the fascination exercised over her by Paris, 
the accomplished musician and brilliant converser, rich 
in all the graces which Yenus, for her own evil pur- 
poses, had bestowed on her favourite. Helen is still, as 
in the Iliad, emphatically " the lady;" the lady of rank 
and fashion, as things were in that day, with all the 
fashionable faults, and all the fashionable good quali- 
ties : selfish and luxurious, gracious and fascinating. 
Her transgressions, and the seemingly lenient view 
which the poet takes of them, have been discussed 
sufficiently in the Iliad. They are all now condoned. 
She has recovered from her miserable infatuation ; and 
if we are inclined to despise. Menelaus for his easy 



36 THE ODYSSEY. 

temper as a husband, we must remember the mediaeval 
legends of Arthur and Guinevere, to whom Helen bears, 
in many points of character, a strong resemblance. The 
readiness which Arthur shows to have accepted at any 
time the repentance of his queen is almost repulsive 
to modern feeling, but was evidently not so to the taste 
of the age in which those legends were popular ; nor is 
it at all clear that such forgiveness is less consonant 
with the purest code of morality than the stern im- 
placability towards such offences which the laws of 
modern society would enjoin. Menelaus has forgiven 
Helen, even as Arthur — though not Mr Tennyson's 
Arthur — would have forgiven Guinevere. But she 
has not forgiven herself, and this is a strong redeeming 
point in her character; " shameless" is still the un- 
compromising epithet which she applies to herself, as 
in the Iliad, even in the presence of her husband and 
his guests. 

They, too, have been wanderers since the fall of 
Troy, like the lost Ulysses. The king tells his own 
story before he interrogates his guest : — 

" Hardly I came at last, in the eighth year, 
Home with my ships from my long wanderings. 
Far as to Cyprus in my woe severe, 
Phoenice, Egypt, did the waves me bear. 
Sidon and Ethiopia I have seen, 
Even to Erembus roamed, and Libya, where 
The lambs are full-horned from their birth, I ween, 
And in the rolling year the fruitful flocks thrice yean." 

He has grown rich in his travels, and would be happy, 
but for the thought of his brother Agamemnon's mis- 
erable end. Another grief, too, lies very close to his 



TELEMACHUS IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 37 

heart — the uncertainty which still shrouds the fate of 
his good comrade Ulysses. 

" His was the fate to suffer grievous woe, 
And mine to mourn without forgetfulness, 
While onward and still on the seasons flow, 
And he yet absent, and I comfortless. 
Whether he live or die we cannot guess. 
Him haply old Laertes doth lament, 
And sage Penelope, in sore distress, 
And to Telemachus the hours are spent 
In sadness, whom he left new-born when first he went." 



The son is touched at the reminiscence, and drops a 
quiet tear, while for a moment he covers his eyes with 
his robe. It is at this juncture that Helen enters the 
hall. Her quick thought seizes the truth at once ; as 
she had detected the father through his disguise of 
rags when he came as a spy into Troy, so now she 
recognises the son at once by his strong personal 
resemblance. Then Menelaus, too, sees the likeness, 
and connects it with the youth's late emotion. Young 
Pisistratus at once tells him who his friend is, and on 
what errand they are travelling together. Warm is the 
greeting which the King of Sparta bestows on the son 
of his old friend. There shall be no more lamentation 
for this night; all painful subjects shall be at least 
postponed until the morrow. But still, as the feast 
goes on, the talk is of Ulysses. Helen has learnt, 
too, in her wanderings, some of the secrets of Egyp- 
tian pharmacy. She has mixed in the wine a potent 
Eastern drug, which raises the soul above all care and 
sorrow — 



38 THE ODYSSEY. 

- " Which so cures heartache and the inward stings, 
That men forget all sorrow wherein they pine. 
He who hath tasted of the draught divine 
Weeps not that day, although his mother die 
Or father, or cut off before his eyen 
Brother or child beloved fall miserably, 
Hewn by the pitiless sword, he sitting silent by." 

The " Nepenthes " of Helen has obtained a wide poetical 
celebrity. Some allegorical interpreters of the poem 
would have us understand that it is the charms of con- 
versation which have this miraculous power to make 
men forget their grief. Without at all questioning 
their efficacy, it may be safely assumed that the poet 
had in his mind something more material. The drug 
has been supposed to be opium; but the effects ascribed 
to the Arabian " haschich " — a preparation of hemp — 
correspond very closely with those said to be produced 
by Helen's potion. Sir Henry Halford thought it 
might more probably be the " hyoscyamus," which he 
says is still used at Constantinople and in the Morea 
under the name of "Nebensch"* 

Not till the next morning does Telemachus discuss 
with Menelaus the object of his journey. What little 
the Spartan king can tell him of the fate of his father 
is so far reassuring, that there is good hope he is yet 
alive. But he is — or was — detained in an enchanted 
island. There the goddess Calypso holds him an un- 
willing captive, and forces her love upon him. He 
longs sore for his home in Ithaca ; but the spells of 
the enchantress are too strong. So much has Menelaus 
learnt, during his own wanderings, while wind-bound. 
* See Hayman's Odyssey, I. 118, note. 



TELEMACHUS IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 39 

at Pharos in Egypt, from Proteus, " the old man of 
the sea " — 

" Who knows all secret things in ocean pent." 

The knowledge had to be forced from him by stratagem. 
Proteus was in the habit of coming up out of the sea 
at mid-day to sleep under the shadow of the rocks, 
with his flock of seals about him. Instructed by his 
daughter Eidothea — who had taken pity on the wan- 
derers — Menelaus and some of his comrades had dis- 
guised themselves in seal-skins* (though much dis- 
turbed, as he confesses, by the " very ancient and fish- 
like smell"), and had seized the ancient sea-god as he 
lay asleep on the shore. Proteus, like the genie in the 
Arabian tale, changed himself rapidly into all manner 
of terrible forms ; but Menelaus held him fast until 
he was obliged to resume his own, when, confessing 
himself vanquished by the mortal, the god proceeded 
in recompense to answer his questions as to his own 
fate, and that of his companion chiefs, the wanderers 
on their way home from Troy. The transformations of 
Proteus have much exercised the ingenuity of the 
allegorists. The pliancy of such principles of inter- 
pretation becomes amusingly evident, when one autho- 
rity explains to us that here are symbolised the wiles 

* The Esquimaux adopt the very same stratagem in order to 
get near the seals. "Sir Edward Beecher, in a dissertation on 
Esquimaux habits read before the British Association, told a 
story, that he was once levelling his rifle at a supposed seal, 
when a shipmate's well-known voice from within the hide ar- 
rested his aim with the words, ' Don't shoot — it's Husky, 
sir ! ' " — Hayman's Odyssey, app. xliiL - - - " ' ' - - 



40 THE ODYSSEY. 

of sophistry — another, that it is the inscrutability of 
truth, ever escaping from the seeker's grasp ; while 
others, again, see in Proteus the versatility of nature, 
the various ideals of philosophers, or the changes of 
the atmosphere. From such source had the king learnt 
the terrible end of his brother Agamemnon, and the 
ignoble captivity of Ulysses; but for himself, the 
favourite of heaven, a special exemption has been de- 
creed from the common lot of mortality. It is thus 
that Proteus reads the fates for the husband of 
Helen : — 

" Thee to Elysian fields, earth's farthest end, 
Where Bhadamanthus dwells, the gods shall send ; 
Where mortals easiest pass the careless hour ; 
No lingering winters there, nor snow, nor shower, 
But ocean ever, to refresh mankind, 
Breathes the shrill spirit of the western wind." 

The grand lines of Homer are thus grandly rendered 
by Abraham Moore. Homer repeats the description of 
the Elysian fields, the abode of the blest, in a subse- 
quent passage of the poem, which has been translated 
almost word for word — yet as only a poet could trans- 
late it — by the Eoman Lucretius. Mr Tennyson has 
the same great original before him when he makes his 
King Arthur see, in his dying thought, 

t( The island- valley of Avilion, 
Where falls not hail nor rain nor any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows loudly ; but it lies 
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns, 
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea." 

The calm sweet music of these lines has charmed 






TELEMACHUS W QUEST OF HIS FATHER. 41 

many a reader who never knew that the strain had 
held all Greece enchanted two thousand years ago. It 
has been scarcely possible to add anything to the quiet 
beauty of the original Greek, but the English poet has 
at least shown exquisite skill in the setting of the jewel. 
But Homer has always been held as common property 
by later poets. Milton's classical taste had previously 
adopted some of the imagery ; the " Spirit " in the 
I Masque of Comus ' speaks of the happy climes which 
are his proper abode : — 

6f There eternal summer dwells, 
And west winds, with musky wing, 
About the cedarn alleys fling 
Nard and cassia's balmy smells." 

Gladly would Menelaus have kept the son of his old 
comrade with him longer as a guest, but Telemachus is 
impatient to rejoin his galley, which waits for him at 
Pylos. His host reluctantly dismisses him, not without 
parting gifts ; but the gift which the king would have 
had him take — a chariot and yoke of three swift horses 
— the island-prince will not accept. Ithaca has no 
room for horse-coursing, and he loves his rocky home all 
the better. 

" With me no steeds to Ithaca shall sail. 
Such leave I here— thy grace, thy rightful vaunt, 
Lord of a level land, where never fail 
Lotus, and rye, and wheat, and galingale : 
No room hath Ithaca to course, no mead — 
Goat-haunted, dearer than horse-feeding vale." 

There is much consternation in the palace of Ulysses 
when the absence of Telemachus is at last discovered. 



42 THE ODYSSEY. 

Antinous and his fellow-revellers are struck with aston- 
ishment at the bold step he has suddenly taken, and 
with alarm at the possible result. Antinous will man 
a vessel at once, and waylay him in the straits on his 
return. The revelation of this plot to Penelope by 
Medon, the herald, one of the few faithful retainers of 
Ulysses' house, makes her for the first time aware of her 
son's departure; for old Eurycleia has kept her darling's 
secret safe even from his mother. In an agony of grief 
she sits down amidst her sympathising maidens, and 
bewails herself as "twice bereaved," of son and husband. 
She lifts her prayer to Minerva, and the goddess hears. 
When Penelope has wept herself to sleep, there stands 
at the head of her couch what seems the form of her 
sister Iphthime, and assures her of her son's safety : he 
has a guardian about his path "such as many a hero 
would pray to have." Even in her dream, Penelope is 
half conscious of the dignity of her visitor ; and, true 
wife that she is, she prays the vision to tell her some- 
thing of her absent husband. But such revelation, the 
figure tells her, is no part of its mission, and so vanishes 
into thin air. The sleeper awakes — it is a dream indeed ; 
but it has left a lightness and elasticity of spirit which 
the queen accepts as an augury of good to come. 



CHAPTEK III 

ULYSSES WITH CALYPSO AND THE PH^ACIANS. 

The fifth book of the poem opens with a second council 
of the gods. . It has been remarked with some truth 
that the gods of the Odyssey are, on the whole, more-dig- 
nified than those of the Iliad. They are divided in this 
poem, as well as in the other, in their loves and hates 
towards mortals, but their dissensions are neither so pas- 
sionate nor so grotesque. Minerva complains bitterly to 
the Euler of Olympus of the injustice with which her 
favourite Ulysses is treated, by being kept so long an 
exile from his home. She, too, repeats the indignant 
protest which the poet had before put into the mouth 
of Mentor, which has found vent in all times and ages, 
from Job and the Psalmist downwards, when in the 
bitterness of a wounded spirit men rebel against what 
seems the inequality of the justice of heaven; that "there 
is one event to the righteous and the wicked ; " nay, that 
the wicked have even the best of it. " Let never king 
henceforth do justly and love mercy ; but let him rule 
with- iron hand and work all iniquity; for lo ! what 
is Ulysses' reward 1" Jupiter . is moved by the appeal.. 



44 THE ODYSSEY. 

He at once despatches Mercury to the island of Calypso, 
to announce to her that Ulysses must be released from her 
toils ; such is his sovereign will, and it must be obeyed. 
The description of the island-grotto in which Calypso 
dwells is one of the most beautiful in Homer, and it is 
a passage upon which our English translators have de- 
lighted to employ their very best powers. Perhaps 
Leigh Hunt's version is the most simply beautiful, and 
as faithful as any. Mercury has sped on his errand * — 

" And now arriving at the isle, he springs 
Oblique, and landing with subsided wings, 
Walks to the cavern 'mid the tall green rocks, 
Where dwelt the goddess with the lovely locks. 
He paused ; and there came on him, as he stood, 
A smell of cedar and of citron wood, 
That threw a perfume all about the isle ; 
And she within sat spinning all the while, 
And sang a low sweet song that made him hark and smile. 
A sylvan nook it was, grown round with trees, 
Poplars, and elms, and odorous cypresses, 
In which all birds of ample wing, the owl 
And hawk, had nests, and broad-tongued waterfowl. 
The cave in front was spread with a green vine, 
Whose dark round bunches almost burst with wine ; 
And from four springs, running a sprightly race, 
Four fountains clear and crisp refreshed the place ; 
While all about a meadowy ground was seen, 
Of violets mingling with the parsley green." 

Calypso recognises the messenger, for the immortals, 
says the poet, know each other always. Mercury tells 
his errand — a bitter one for the nymph to hear, for she 
has set her heart upon her mortal lover. Very hard 
and envious, she says, is the Olympian tyrant, to 
grudge her this harmless fancy. [She must have 
thought in her heart, though the poet does not put 



ULYSSES WITH CALYPSO. 45 

it into words for her, that Jupiter should surely have 
some sympathy for weaknesses of which he set so 
remarkable an example.] But she will obey, as needs 
she must. Ulysses shall go ; only he must build him- 
self a boat, for there is none in her island. She goes 
herself to announce to him his coming deliverance. 
She finds him sitting pensively, as is his wont, on the 
sea-beach, looking and longing in the direction of 
Ithaca. 

" Companion of the rocks, the livelong light, 
He dreaming on the shore, but not at rest, 
With groans and tears and lingering undelight 
Gazed on the pulses of the ocean's breast." 

His heart is in his native island; but, sooth to say, he 
makes the best of his present captivity. He endures, 
if he does not heartily reciprocate, the love of his fair 
jailer. The correspondence in many points of these 
Homeric lays with the legends of mediaeval Christendom, 
especially with those of Arthur and his Eound Table, 
has been already noticed. It has been said also that, 
on the whole, the moral tone of Homer is far purer. 
But there is one bright creation of mediaeval fiction 
which finds no counterpart in the song of the Greek 
bard. It was only Christianity — one might almost say 
it was only mediaeval Christianity — which could con- 
ceive the pure ideal of the stainless knight who has kept 
his maiden innocence, — who only can sit in the " siege 
perilous " and win the holy Grail, " because his heart 
is pure." Among all the heroes of Iliad or Odyssey 
there is no Sir Galahad. 

Calypso obeys the behest of Jove reluctantly, but 



46 THE ODYSSEY. 

without murmuring. Goddess -like or woman -like, 
however, she cannot fail to be mortified at the want of 
any reluctance on her lover's part to leave her. There 
is something touching in her expostulation :— 

' ( Child of Laertes, wouldst thou fain depart 
Hence to thine own dear fatherland ? FareweU ! 
Yet, couldst thou read the sorrow and the smart, 
With me in immortality to dwell 
Thou wouldst rejoice, and love my mansion well. 
Deeply and long thou yearnest for thy wife ; 
Yet her in beauty I perchance excel. 
Beseems not one who hath but mortal life 
With forms of deathless mould to challenge a vain strife." 

Ulysses' reply is honest and manful : — 

1 ' All this I know and do myself avow. 
Well may Penelope in form and brow 
And stature seem inferior far to thee, 
For she is mortal, and immortal thou. 
Yet even thus 'tis very dear to me 
My long-desired return and ancient home to see. 

" But if some god amid the wine-dark flood 
With doom pursue me, and my vessel mar, 
Then will I bear it as a brave man should. 
Not the first time I suffer. Wave and war 
Deep in my life have graven many a scar." 

It cannot but be observed, however, that while 
Penelope's whole thoughts and interests are concen- 
trated upon her absent husband, the longing of Ulysses 
is rather after his fatherland than his wife. She is 
only one of the many component parts of the home- 
scene which is ever before the wanderer's eyes ; and 
not always the most important part, for his aged father 
and mother and his young son seem to be at least equal 



ULYJSSE& WITH CALYPSO. 47 

objects of anxiety. It may be urged that in this part- 
ing scene with Calypso he is purposely reticent in the 
matter of his affection for Penelope, not caring to draw 
down upon himself the proverbial wrath of " a woman 
scorned ;" and that for a similar reason he suppresses 
his feelings, and quite ignores the existence of his wife, 
at the court of.Alcinous, when that king offers him his 
daughter in marriage. But there is, to say the least, 
some lack of enthusiasm on the husband's part through- 
out. Of the single-hearted devotion of woman to man 
we have striking instances both in Penelope and in the 
Andromache of the Iliad ; but the devotion of man to 
woman had yet long to wait for its development in the 
age of chivalry. 

He builds himself a boat on the island, by Calypso's 
instructions, and when all is ready, she stores it plenti- 
fully with food and wine, and gives him directions for 
his voyage. He launches and sets sail ; but the angry 
god of the sea (irate especially against Ulysses for 
having blinded his son, the giant Polyphemus, as we 
shall learn hereafter) stirs winds and waves against 
him, wrecks his bark, and leaves him clinging for life 
to a broken spar. One of the sea-nymphs, Ino, takes 
pity on him, and gives him a charmed scarf — so long as 
he wears it his life is safe. For two nights and days 
he is tossed helplessly on the ocean ; on the third, with 
sore wounds and bruises, he makes good his landing on 
the rock-bound coast of a strange island. Utterly 
exhausted, he scrapes together a bed of leaves, and 
creeping into it, sinks into a profound sleep. 

He awakes to find himself in a kind of faeryland. 



48 THE ODYSSEY. 

The island on which he has been cast is Scheria,* in- 
habited by the Phaeacians, whose king and people are 
very far indeed from being of the ordinary type of 
mortal men. Whether the poet, in his description of 
these Phaeacian islanders, was exercising his imagina- 
tion only, or indulging his talent for satire, is a contro- 
verted question with Homeric critics. Those who 
would assign this poem of the Odyssey to a different 
author from the writer or writers of the Iliad, and to a 
much later date than that commonly given to Homer, 
have thought that in the good-humoured boastfulness 
of the Phaeacian character, their love of pleasure and 
novelty, and their attachment to the sea, some Ionian 
poet was showing up, under fictitious names, the weak- 
nesses of his own countrymen. Others take the Phae- 
acians to be only another name for the Phoenicians, 
the sailors of all seas, who had probably in their char- 
acter somewhat of the egotism and exaggeration which 
have been commonly reputed faults of men who have 
travelled far and seen much. Whatever may be the 
true interpretation of the story, or whether there be 
any interpretation at all, this curious episode in the 
adventures of Ulysses is unquestionably rather comic 
than serious. The names are all significant, some- 
what after the fashion of those assumed by the Eed 
men. The king (Alcinous) is " Strong-mind," son of 
"The Swift Seaman," and he has a brother called 
" Crusher of Men." The nautical names of his cour- 
tiers — " Prow-man" and "Stern-man," and the rest — 
are as palpably conventional as our own Tom Bowline 

* Possibly Corfu, if the geography is to be at all identified. 



' ULYSSES WITH THE PH^ACIANS, 49 

and Captain Crosstree. The hero's introduction to 
his new hosts presents, nevertheless, one of the most 
beautiful scenes in the poem. The patriarchal sim- 
plicity of the tale cannot fail to remind the reader, as 
Homer so often does, of the narratives of the earlier 
Scriptures. 

The princess Nausicaa, daughter of the king of the 
Phseacians,- has had a dream. The dream — which 
comes as naturally to princesses, no doubt, as to other 
young people — is of marriage ; and in this case it could 
be no possible reproach to the dreamer, since the god- 
dess of wisdom is represented as having herself sug- 
gested it. Nor is the dream of any bridegroom in par- 
ticular, but simply of what seems to us the very prosaic 
fact that a wedding outfit, which must soon come to be 
thought of, required household stores of good linen ; 
and that the family stock in the palace, from long 
disuse, stood much in need of washing. Nausicaa 
awakes in the morning, and begs of her father to lend 
her a chariot and a yoke of mules, that she and her 
maidens may go down to the shore, where the river 
joins the sea, to perform this domestic duty. The 
pastoral simplicity of the whole scene is charming. It 
has all the freshness of those earlier ages when the 
business of life was so leisurely and jovially conducted, 
that much of it wore the features of a holiday. The 
princess and her maidens plunge the linen in the stream, 
and stamp it clean with their pretty bare feet (a process 
which will remind an English reader of Arlette and 
Robert of Normandy, and which may be seen in opera- 
tion still at many a burn-side in Scotland), and then go 

a. c. vol. ii. D 



50 TEE ODYSSEY. 

themselves to bathe. An outdoor banquet forms part 
of the day's enjoyment; for the. good queen, Nausicaa's 
mother, has stored the wain with delicate viands and a 
goat-skin of sweet wine. When this is over, the girls 
begin to play at ball. Ulysses, be it remembered, is 
all this while lying fast asleep under his heap of leaves, 
and, as it happens, close by the spot where this merry 
party are disporting themselves. By chance Nausicaa, 
too eager in her game, throws the ball out into the sea \ 
whereupon the whole chorus of handmaidens raise a cry 
of dismay, which at once awakens the sleeper. He is 
puzzled, when he comes to himself, to make out where 
he is ; and still more confounded, when he peers out from 
his hiding-place, to find himself in the close neighbour- 
hood of this bevy of joyous damsels, especially when he 
bethinks himself of the very primitive style of his pre- 
sent costume ; for the scarf which the sea-nymph gave 
him as a talisman he had cast into the sea upon his land- 
ing, as she had especially charged him. But Ulysses 
is far too old a traveller to allow an over- punctilious 
modesty to stand in his way when he is in danger of 
starving. He has no idea of missing this opportunity 
of supplying his wants merely because he has lost his 
wardrobe. He extemporises some very slight covering 
out of an olive-bough, and, in this strange attire, makes 
his sudden appearance before the party. Nausicaa's 
maidens all scream and take to flight — very excusably \ 
but the king's daughter, with a true nobility, stands firm. 
She sees only a shipwrecked man, and "to the pure 
all things are pure." Ulysses is a courtier as well as a 
traveller, and knows much of " cities and men ; " and 



ULYSSES WITH THE PHjEACIANS. 51 

it is not the flattery of a suppliant, but the quick dis- 
cernment of a man of the world, which makes him at 
once assign her true rank to the fair stranger who stands 
before him. He remains at a respectful distance, while, 
in the language of Eastern compliment, he compares 
her to the young palm-tree for grace and beauty, and 
invokes the blessing of the gods upon her marriage-hour, 
if she will take pity on his miserable case. Nausicaa 
recalls her fugitive attendants, and rebukes them for 
their folly, reminding them that " the stranger and the 
poor are the messengers of the gods." The shipwrecked 
hero is supplied at once with food and drink and rai- 
ment j and when he reappears, after having bathed and 
clothed himself, it is with a mien and stature more 
majestic than his wont, with the "hyacinthine locks" 
of immortal youth flowing round his stately shoulders 
— such grace does his guardian goddess bestow upon 
him, that he may find favour in the sight of the Phae- 
acian princess. She looks upon him now with simple 
and undisguised admiration, confessing aside to her 
handmaidens that, when her time for marriage does 
come, she should wish for just such a husband as this 
godlike stranger. There is nothing unmaidenly in such 
language from the lips of Nausicaa. To remain un- 
married was a reproach in her day, whatever it may be 
in ours, and a reproach not likely to fall upon a king's 
daughter ; so, looking upon the marriage state as inevi- 
table, and at her age very near at hand, she thinks and 
speaks of it unreservedly to her companions. Our 
modern conventional silence on such topics arises in 
great degree from the fact that a perpetual maidenhood 



52 THE ODYSSEY. 

is the inevitable lot of far too many in our over-civilised 
society, and, being inevitable, is no reproach. It does 
not consort, therefore, with maidenly dignity to express 
any interest about marriage, for which an opportunity 
may never be offered. 

Eut Nausicaa is at least as careful to observe the 
proprieties, according to her own view of them, as any 
modern young lady. She will promise the shipwreck- 
ed stranger a welcome at her father's court ; but he 
must by no means ride home in the wain with her, or 
even be seen entering the city in her company. So 
Ulysses runs by the side of her mules, and waits in a 
sacred grove near the city gates, until the princess and 
her party have re-entered the palace. When they 
have disappeared, he issues forth, and meets a girl car- 
rying a pitcher. It is once more his guardian goddess 
in disguise. She veils him in a mist, so that he passes 
the streets unquestioned by the natives (who have no 
love for strangers), and stands at last in the presence 
of King Alcinous. 

The king of the Phseacians, as well as his queen, 
boast to be descended from Neptune. His subjects 
therefore, are, as has been said, emphatically a sea- 
going people. Ulysses has already seen with admira- 
tion, as he passed, 

" The smooth wide havens, and the glorious fleet, 
Wherewith those mariners the great deep tire." 

Their galleys, moreover, are unlike any barks that ever 
walked the seas except in a poet's imagination. King 
Alcinous himself describes them : — 



ULYSSES WITH THE PHjEACIANS. 53 

" For unto us no pilots appertain, 
Eudder nor helm which other barks obey. 
These, ruled by reason, their own course essay 
Sharing men's mind. Cities and climes they know, 
And through the deep sea-gorges cleaving way, 
"Wrapt in an ambient vapour, to and fro 
Sail in a fearless scorn of scathe or overthrow." 

The wondrous art of navigation might well seem 
nothing less than miraculous in an age when all the 
forces of nature were personified as gods. So, when 

J the great ship Argo carried out her crew of ancient 
heroes on what was the first voyage of discovery, the 
fable ran that in her prow was set a beam cut from the 
oak of Dodona, which had the gift of speech, and gave 
the voyagers oracles in their distress. Our English 

■ Spenser must have had these Phseacian ships in mind 

i when he describes the "gondelay" which bears the 

; enchantress Phaadria : — 

' ' Eftsoone her shallow ship away did slide, 
More swift than swallow sheres the liquid sky, 
Withouten oar or pilot it to guide, 
Or winged canvass with the wind to fly ; 
Only she turned a pin, and by-and-by 
It cut a way upon the yielding wave, 
(Ne cared she her course for to apply) 
For it was taught the way which she would have, 
And both from rocks and flats itself could wisely save." 

As the men of Phseacia excel all others in seaman- 
ship, so also do the women in the feminine accomplish- 
ments of weaving and embroidery. But they are not, 
| as they freely confess, a nation of warriors : they love 
j the feast and the dance and the song, and care little for 
what other men call glory. The palace of Alcinons 



54 TEE ODYSSEY. 

and its environs are all in accordance with this luxuri- 
ous type of character. All round the palace He gardens 
and orchards, which rejoice in an enchanted climate, 
under whose influence their luscious products ripen in 
an unfailing succession : — 



" There in full prime the orchard-trees grow tall, 
Sweet fig, pomegranate, apple fruited fair, 
Pear and the healthful olive. Each and all 
Both summer droughts and chills of winter spare ; 
All the year round they flourish. Some the air 
Of Zephyr warms to life, some doth mature. 
Apple grows old on apple, pear on pear, 
Fig follows fig, vintage doth vintage lure ; 
Thus the rich revolution doth for aye endure." 

When the traveller enters within the palace itself, 
he finds himself surrounded with equal wonders. 

" For, like the sun's fire or the moon's, a light 

Far streaming through the high-roofed house did pass 
From the long basement to the topmost height. 
There on each side ran walls of flaming brass, 
Zoned on the summit with a blue bright mass 

, Of cornice ; and the doors were framed of gold ; 
Where, underneath, the brazen floor doth glass 
Silver pilasters, which with grace uphold 
Lintel of silver framed ; the ring was burnished gold. 

" And dogs on each side of the doors there stand, 
Silver and gold, the which in ancient day 
Hephaestus wrought with cuiming brain and hand, 
And set for sentinels to hold the way. 
Death cannot tame them, nor the years decay. 
And from the shining threshold thrones were set, 
Skirting the walls in lustrous long array, 
On to the far room, where the women met, 
With many a rich robe strewn and woven coverlet. 



ULYSSES WITH THE PH^EACIANS. 55 

" There the Phaeacian chieftains eat and drink, 
While golden youths on pedestals upbear 
Each in his outstretched hand a lighted link, 
Which nightly on the royal feast doth flare. 
And in the house are fifty handmaids fair ; 
Some in the mill the yellow corn grind small ; 
Some ply the looms, and shuttles twirl, which there 
Flash like the quivering leaves of aspen tall ; 
And from the close-spun weft the trickling oil will fall." 



King Alcinous sits on his golden throne, " quaffing 
his wine like a god." His queen, Arete, sits beside 
him, weaving yarn of the royal purple. Warned by his 
kind friend the princess, Ulysses passes by the king's 
seat, and falls at the feet of the queen. In the court of 
Phaeacia — whether the story be disguised fact or pure 
fiction, whether the poet was satiric or serious — the rul- 
ing influence lies with the women. The mist in which 
Minerva had enveloped his person melts away; and 
while all gaze in astonishment at his sudden appear- 
ance, he claims hospitality as a shipwrecked wanderer, 
and then, after the fashion of suppliants, seats himself 
on the hearth-stone. The hospitality of Alcinous is 
prompt and magnificent. He bids one of his sons rise 
up and cede the place of honour to the stranger. If 
he be mortal man, the boon he asks shall be granted : 
but it may be that he is one of the immortals, who, as 
he gravely assures his guest, often condescend to come 
down and share the banquets of the Phseacians, and 
make themselves known to them face to face. Ulysses 
assures his royal host, in a passage which is in itself 
sufficient to mark the subdued comedy of the episode, 
that far from having any claim to divinity, he is very 



56 THE ODYSSEY. 

mortal indeed, and wholly taken up at present with 
one of the most inglorious of mortal cravings : — 

" Nothing more shameless is than Appetite, 
Who still, whatever anguish load our breast, 
Makes us remember, in our own despite, 
Both food and drink. Thus I, thrice wretched wight, 
Carry of inward grief surpassing store, 
Yet she constrains me with superior might, 
Wipes clean away the memory- written score, 
And takes whate'er I give, and taking, craveth more. " * 

There is every appliance to satisfy appetite, however, 
in the luxurious halls of Alcinous. While Ulysses is 
seated at table, Queen Arete, careful housewife as she 
is with all her royalty, marks with some curiosity that 
the raiment which their strange guest wears must have 
come from her own household stores — so well does 
she know the work of herself and her handmaidens. 
This leads to a confession on Ulysses' part of his pre- 
vious interview with JSTausicaa, whom he praises, as he 
had good right to do, as wise beyond her years. So 
charmed is the king with his guest's taste and discern- 
ment, that he at once declares that nothing would 

* This humorous impersonation of one of the lowest, but 
certainly the strongest, influences of our common nature, has 
been made use of by later writers. The Roman poets Virgil 
and Persius take up Homer's idea : and Rabelais, closely fol- 
lowing the latter, introduces his readers to a certain powerful 
personage whom lie found surrounded by worshippers — "one 
Master Gaster, the greatest Master of Arts in the world." 
[" Gaster " is Homer's Greek word, which Mr Worsley renders 
by "appetite," but which is more literally Englished by the 
old Scriptural word " belly."] 






ULTSSES WITH THE PHjEACIANS. 57 

please him better than to retain him at his court in 
the character of a son-in-law. Ulysses (whose fate it 
is throughout his wanderings to make himself only too 
interesting to the fair sex generally) is by this time too 
much accustomed to such proposals to show any em- 
barrassment. With his usual diplomacy he puts the 
question aside — bowing his acknowledgments only, it 
may be, though Homer does not tell us even so much 
as this. The one point to which he addresses himself 
is the king's promise to send him safe home, which 
he accepts with thankfulness. Before they retire for 
the night, the queen herself does not disdain to give 
special orders for their guest's accommodation. She 
bids her maidens prepare 

" A couch beneath the echoing corridor, 
And thereon spread the crimson carpets fair, 
Then the wide coverlets of richness rare, 
And to arrange the blankets warm and white, 
Wherein who sleepeth straight forgets his care. 
They then, each holding in her hand a light, 
From the great hall pass forth, and spread the robes aright." 

The combination of magnificence with simplicity is 
of a wholly Oriental character. The appliances of 
the court might be those of a modern Eastern poten- 
tate; yet the queen is a thrifty housekeeper, the 
princess-royal superintends the family wash, and the 
five sons of the royal family, when their sister comes 
home, themselves come forward and unyoke her mules 
from the wain which has brought home the linen. 

The next day is devoted to feasting and games in 
honour of the stranger. Amongst the company sits 



58 THE ODYSSEY. 

the blind minstrel Demodocus, in whose person it has 
been thought that the poet describes himself — 

" Whom the Muse loved, and gave him good and ill ; 
111, that of light she did his eyes deprive, 
Good, that sweet minstrelsies divine at will 
She lent him, and a voice men's ears to thrill. 
For him Pontonous silver-studded chair 
Set with the feasters, leaning it with skill 
Against the column, and with tender care 
Made the blind fingers feel the harp suspended there. " 

Such honour has the bard in ail lands. The king's 
son does not disdain to guide "the blind fingers;" 
and when the song is over, the herald leads him care- 
fully to his place at the banquet, where his portion 
is of the choicest — "the chine of the white-tusked 
boar." The subject of his lay is the tale which charms 
all hearers — Phaeacian, Greek, or Eoman, ancient or 
modern, then as now — the tale of Troy. Touched 
with the remembrances which the song awakens, 
Ulysses wraps his face in his mantle to hide his 
rising tears. The king marks his guest's emotion : too 
courteous to allude to it, he contents himself with 
rising at once from the banquet-table, and giving order 
for the sports to begin. Foot-race, wrestling, quoit- 
throwing, and boxing, all have their turn ; and in all 
the king's sons take their part, not unsuccessfully. 
It is suggested at last that the stranger, who stands 
silently looking on, should exhibit some feat of strength 
or skill. Ulysses declines — he has no heart just now 
for pastimes. Then one of the young Phaeaciaiis, 
Euryalus, who has just won the wrestling-match, gives 



ULYSSES WITH THE PHjEACIANS. 59 

vent to an ungracious taunt. Their guest, lie says, 
is plainly no hero, nor versed in the noble science of 
athletics ; he must be some skipper of a merchantman, 
"whose talk is all of cargoes." He brings clown upon 
himself a grand rebuke from Ulysses: — 

" Man, thou hast not said well ; a fool thou art. 
Not all fair gifts to all doth God divide, 
Eloquence, beauty, and a noble heart. 
One seems in mien poor, but his feebler part 
God crowns with language, that men learn to love 
The form, so feelingly the sweet words dart 
"Within them. First in councils he doth prove, 
And, 'mid the crowd observant, like a god doth move. 

" Another, though in mould of form and face 
Like the immortal gods he seems to be, 
Hath no wise word to crown the outward grace 
So is thine aspect fair exceedingly, 
Wherein no blemish even a god might see ; 
Yet is thine understanding wholly vain." 

Then the hero who has thrown the mighty Ajax in 
the wrestling - ring, who is swifter of foot than any 
Greek except Achilles, and who has been awarded 
that matchless hero's arms as the prize of valour 
against all competitors, — rises in his wrath, and gives 
his gay entertainers a taste of his quality. ISTot deign- 
ing even to throw off his mantle, he seizes a huge 
stone quoit, and hurls it, after a single swing, far 
beyond the point reached by any of the late com- 
petitors. The astonished islanders crouch to the 
ground as it sings through the air above their heads. 
Once roused, Ulysses launches out into the self-asser- 
tion which has been remarked as beincj common to all 



60 THE ODYSSEY. 

the heroes of Homeric story. He challenges the whole 
circle of bystanders to engage with hirn in whatsoever 
contest they will — 

" AU feats I know that are beneath the sun." 

He will not, indeed, compare himself with some of the 
heroes of old, such as were Hercules and Eurytus ; 

" But of all else I swear that I stand first, 
Such men as now upon the earth eat bread." 

None of the Pheeacians will accept the challenge. 
The king commends the spirit in which the stranger 
has repelled the insult of Euryalus, and with the gay 
good -humour which marks the Phaeacian character, 
confesses that in feats of strength his nation can claim 
no real excellence, but only in speed of foot and in 
seamanship ; or, above all, in the dance — in this no 
men can surpass them. His guest shall see and judge. 
Mne grave elders, by the king's command (and here 
the satire is evident, even if we have lost the applica- 
tion) stand forth as masters of the ceremonies, and 
clear the lists for dancing. A band of selected youths 
perform an elaborate ballet, while the minstrel Demod- 
ocus sings to his harp a sportive lay, not over-deli- 
cate, of the stolen loves of Mars and Venus, and their 
capture in the cunning net of Vulcan. If it must be 
granted that this song forms a strong exception to the 
purity of Homer's muse, it has also been fairly pleaded 
for him, that it is introduced as characteristic of an 
unwarlike nation and an effeminate society. But 
even in his lightest mood the poet has no sort of 



ULYSSES WITH THE PHJEJACIANS. 61 

sympathy with a wife's unfaithfulness. He takes 
his gods and goddesses as he found them in the 
popular creed ; bad enough, and far worse than the 
mortal men and women of his own poetical creation. 
But his own morals are far higher than those of Olym- 
pus. Even in this questionable ballad of the Phseacian 
minstrel the point of the jest is in strong contrast to 
some of the comedies of a more modern school. It is 
on the detected culprits, not on the injured husband, 
that the ridicule of gods and men is mercilessly 
showered. When the ballet is concluded, two of the 
king's sons, at their father's bidding, perform a sort 
of minuet, in which ball-play is introduced. Ulysses 
expresses his admiration of the whole performance in 
words which sound like solemn irony : — 

" king, pre-eminent in word and deed, 
Of late thy lips the threatening vaunt did make 
That these thy dancers all the world exceed — 
Now have I seen fulfilment of thy rede ; 
Yea, wonder holds me while I gaze thereon." 

So all passes off with pleasant compliments between 
hosts and guest. The king and his twelve peers pre- 
sent Ulysses with costly gifts, and Euryalus, in pledge 
of regret for his late unseemly speech, offers his own 
silver-hilted sword with its ivory scabbard. 

From the games they pass again to the banquet ; and 
one more glimpse is given us of the gentle Nausicaa, 
perfectly in keeping with the maiden guilelessness of 
her character. Ulysses — still radiant with the more 
than human beauty which the goddess has bestowed 
upon him — moves to his place in the hall. 



62 TEE ODYSSEY. 

"He from the bath, cleansed from the dust of toil, 
Passed to the drinkers ; and Nausicaa there , 
Stood, moulded by the gods exceeding fair. 
She on the roof-tree pillar leaning, heard 
Odysseus ; turning, she beheld him near. ' 
Deep in her breast admiring wonder stirred, 
And in a low sweet voice she spake this winged word. 

' ' ' Hail, stranger-guest ! when fatherland and wife 

Thou shalt revisit, then remember me, 

Since to me first thou owest the price of life.' 

And to the royal virgin answered he : 

1 Child of a generous sire, if willed it be 

By Thunderer Zeus, who all dominion hath, 

That I my home and dear return yet see, 

There at thy shrine will I devote my breath, 
There worship thee, dear maid, my saviour from dark death.' " 

It is not easy to discover, with any certainty, what 
the Greek poet meant us to understand as to the feel- 
ings of Nausicaa towards Ulysses. It has been said 
that Love, in the complex modern acceptation of the 
term, is unknown to the Greek poets. Nor is there, 
in this passage, any approach to the expression of such 
a feeling on the part of the princess. Yet, had the 
scene found place in the work of a modern poet, we 
should have understood at once that, without any kind of 
reproach to the perfect maidenly delicacy of Nausicaa, 
it was meant to show us the dawn of a tender senti- 
ment — nothing more — towards the stranger-guest whom 
the gods had endowed with such majestic graces of 
person, who stood so high above all rivals in feats of 
strength and skill, whose misfortunes surrounded him 
with a double interest, and, above all, in whom she felt 
a kind of personal property as his deliverer.- 



ULYSSES WITH THE PHjEACIANS. 63 

The Greek historian Plutarch chivalrously defends 
the young princess from the charge of forwardness, 
which ungallant critics brought against her as early as 
his day. It was no marvel, he says, that she knew 
and valued a hero w r hen she saw him, and preferred 
him to the carpet-knights of her own country, who 
were good only at the dance and the banquet. But 
with her it was, after all, a sentiment, and no more ; 
but which might have ; ripened into love, under other 
circumstances, had the hero of her maiden fancy been 
as free to choose as she was. 

So vanishes from the page one of the sweetest cre- 
ations of Greek fiction — the more charming to us, as 
coming nearest, perhaps, of all to the modern type of 
feeling. The farewell to Nausicaa is briefly said ; and 
Ulysses, sitting by King Alcinous at the banquet, pays 
a high compliment to the blind minstrel, and gives him 
a new theme for song. Since he knows so well the 
story of the great Siege, let him now take his lyre, and 
sing to them of the wondrous Horse. Demodocus 
obeys. He sings how the Greeks, hopeless of taking 
Troy by force of arms, had recourse at last to strata- 
gem : how they constructed a huge framework in the 
shape of a horse, ostensibly an offering to the gods, 
and then set fire to their sea-camp, and sailed away — 
for home, to all appearance — leaving an armed company 
hidden in the womb of the wooden monster ; how 
the Trojans, after much doubt, dragged it inside their 
walls, and how, in the night-time, the Greeks issued 
from their strange ambush, and spread fire and sword 
through the devoted city. And all along Ulysses 



64 THE ODYSSEY. 

is the hero of the lay. He is the leader of the 
venturous band who thus carried their lives in their 
hands into the midst of their enemies : he it is who, 
"like unto Mars," storms the house of Deiphobus, 
who had taken Helen to wife after the death of his 
brother Paris, and restores the Spartan princess to her 
rightful lord. Tears of emotion again fill the listener's 
eyes ; and again the courteous king bids the minstrel 
cease, when he sees that some chord of mournful re- 
membrance is struck in the heart of his guest. But he 
now implores him, as he has good right to do, to tell 
them who he really is. Why does the Tale of Troy 
so move him ? The answer, replies the stranger, will 
be a long tale, and sad to tell ; but his very name, 
he proudly says, is a history — " I am Ulysses, son of 
Laertes V 7 



CHAPTER IV. 

ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS. 

The narrative, which Ulysses proceeds to relate to his 
host, takes hack his story to the departure of the Greek 
fleet from Troy. First, on his homeward course, he 
and his comrades had landed on the coast of Thrace, 
and laid waste the town of the Ciconians. Instead of 
putting to sea again with their plunder, the crews stayed 
to feast on the captured beeves and the red wine. 
" Wrapt in the morning mist," large bodies of the 
natives surprised them at this disadvantage, and they 
had to re-embark with considerable loss. This was the 
beginning of their troubles. They were rounding the 
southern point of Greece, when a storm bore them out 
far to sea, and not until sunset on the tenth day did 
they reach an unknown shore — the land of the Lotus- 
eaters — 

<c Who, on the green earth couched beside the main, 
Seemed ever with sweet food their lips to entertain." 

To determine the geography of the place is as difficult 
as to ascertain the natural history of the lotus, though 
a. c. vol. ii. e 



66 THE ODYSSEY. 

critics have been very confident in doing both.* The 
effect of the seductive food on the companions of 
Ulysses is thus described : — 

" And whoso tasted of their flowery meat 
Cared not with tidings to return, but clave 
Fast to that tribe, for ever fain to eat, 
Keckless of home-return, the tender Lotus sweet." 

Those who ate of it had to be dragged back by main 
force to their galleys, and bound fast with thongs, so 
loath were they to leave that shore of peaceful rest and 
forgetfulness. In the words of our own poet, who has 
founded one of the most imaginative of his poems on 
this incident of Ulysses' voyage, so briefly told by 
Homer — 

" Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar, 
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. 
Then some one said — s We will return no more : ' 
And all at once they sang — '- Our island-home 
Is far beyond the wave ; we will no longer roam.' " f 



* The Greek historian Herodotus places a tribe of lotus- 
eaters, "who live by eating nothing but the fruit of the lotus," 
on the coast of Africa, somewhere near Tripoli. Pliny and other 
ancient writers on natural history speak of this fruit as in shape 
like an olive, with a flavour like that of figs or dates, not only 
pleasant to eat fresh, but which, when dry, was made into a 
kind of meal. The English travellers Shaw and Park found (in 
the close neighbourhood of Herodotus' lotus-eaters) what they 
thought to be the true lotus — a shrub bearing "small farinace- 
ous berries, of a yellow colour and delicious taste." Park says — 
"An army may very well have been fed with the bread I have 
tasted made of the meal of the fruit, as is said by Pliny to have 
been done in Libya." There is also a water-plant in Egypt 
mentioned by Herodotus under the name of lotus — probably 
the Nymphcea lotus of Linnaeus. 

t Tennyson, "The Lotus-Eaters." 



ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS. 67 

It has been thought that here we have possibly the 
bread-fruit tree of the South Sea Islands, with some 
hint of the effect produced by their soft and enervating 
climate, and that the voyage of Ulysses anticipated in 
some degree the discoveries of Anson and Cook. It is 
curious that, in Cook's case, the seductions of those 
islands gave him the same trouble as they did Ulysses ; 
for several of his crew thought, like the Greek sailors, 
that they had found an earthly paradise for which they 
determined to forget home and country, and had to be 
brought back to their ship by force. But the lotus-land 
of the poet is an ideal shore, to which some of us 
moderns may have travelled as well as Ulysses. Its 
deepest recesses will have been reached by the Bud- 
dhist who attains his coveted state of perfect beatitude, 
the "Mrvana," in which a man has found out that 
all having and being, and more especially doing, are a 
mistake. It is the dolce far niente of the Italian ; the 
region free from all cares and responsibilities — " beyond 
the domain of conscience" — which Charles Lamb, half 
in jest and half in earnest, sighed for. 

Bearing away from the shore of the Lotus-eaters, 
Ulysses and his crew next reached the island where 
the Cyclops dwell — a gigantic tribe of rude shepherds, 
monsters in form, having but one eye planted in the 
centre of their foreheads, who know neither laws, nor 
arts, nor commerce. Adventure and discovery have 
always a charm for Ulysses ; and it was with no other 
motive, as he pretty plainly confesses, that he landed 
with his own ship's crew to explore these unknown 
regions. The present adventure had a horrible conclu- 



68 THE ODYSSEY. 

sion for some of his companions. Alone, in a vast 
cave near the shore, dwelt the giant Polyphemus, a son 
of Neptune the sea-god, and folded his flocks in its 
deep recesses. They did not find the monster within : 
hut the pails of brimming milk, and huge piles of 
cheese, stood ranged in order round the walls of the 
cavern. Nothing would satisfy Ulysses but to await 
the owner's return. At evening he came, driving his 
flocks before him ; and, as was his wont, began to busy 
himself in his dairy operations. By the red glow of 
the firelight he soon discovered the intruders, as they 
crouched in a corner. In vain they made appeal to 
his hospitality, reminding him that strangers were 
under the special care of Jupiter. What care the 
Cyclops race for the gods ? So he seized two of the 
unhappy Greeks, dashed them on the ground — " like 
puppies " — devoured them, blood, bones, and all, after 
the manner of giants, and washed down his horrible 
supper with huge bowls of milk. Two more furnished 
him with breakfast in the morning. But the craft of 
Ulysses was more than a match for the savage. He had 
carried with him on his dangerous expedition (having 
a kind of presentiment that it would prove useful) a 
skin of wine of rare quality and potency, and of this 
he gave Polyphemus to drink after his last cannibal 
meal. Charmed with the delicious draught, the giant 
begged to know his benefactor's name. The answer of 
Ulysses is the oldest specimen on record of the art of 
punning. 

" ' Hear then ; my name is Noman. From of old 
My father, mother, these my comrades bold, 



ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS. 69 

PGive me this title.' So I spake, and he 
Answered at once with mind of ruthless mould : 
' This shall fit largess unto Noman be — 
Last, after all thy peers, I promise to eat thee." 

Then, overcome by the potent drink, the savage lay 
down to sleep. Ulysses had prepared the thin end of 
a huge club of olive-wood, and this, pointed and well 
hardened in the fire, he and his comrades thrust into 
his single eye-ball, boring it deep in, " as the shipwright 
doth an auger." Eoaring with pain, and now fairly 
sobered, Polyphemus awoke, and shouted for help to 
his brother-Cyclops who dwelt in the neighbouring 
valleys. They came \ but to all their questions as to 
what was the matter, or who had injured him, he only 
answered " Noman ! " — and his friends turned away 
in disgust. After groping vainly round the cave in 
search of his tormentors, Polyphemus rolled the huge 
stone from the mouth of his den, and let his sheep go 
out, feeling among them for his captives, who would 
probably try thus to escape. But again the wit of the 
Ithacan chief proved too subtle for his enemy. The 
great sheep had been cunningly linked together three 
abreast, and every middle sheep carried a Greek tied 
under his belly; Ulysses, after tying the last of his 
companions, clinging fast to the wool of a huge ram, 
the king of the flock. So did they all escape to rejoin 
their anxious comrades. But when all had embarked, 
and rowed to a safe distance, then Ulysses stood high 
upon his deck, and shouted a taunting defiance to his 
enemy. The answer of Polyphemus was a huge rock 
hurled with all his might towards the voice, which fell 



70 THE ODYSSEY. 

just short of the vessel. Again Ulysses shouted, and 
hade him tell those who should hereafter ask him who 
did the deed, that it was even Ulysses the Ithacan. 
The Cyclops groaned with rage and grief — an ancient 
oracle had forewarned him of the name ; but will the 
great Ulysses please to return, that he may entertain 
such a hero handsomely? He would have shown 
himself more simple than his enemy if he had. 
Then the blind monster lifted his cry to his great 
father the Sea-god, and implored his vengeance on 
his destroyer. 

The one-eyed giant of Homer's story became a very 
popular comic character in classical fiction. The only 
specimen of the old Greek satyric drama, as it was 
called — a peculiar kind of comedy, in which satyrs 
were largely introduced — is a play by Euripides, ' The 
Cyclops/ in which the principal incident is the blind- 
ing of Polyphemus by Ulysses. The monster rushes 
out of his cave, with his eye-socket burnt and bleed- 
ing, and stretches his arms across the entrance to in- 
tercept the escape of Ulysses, who creeps out between 
his legs. He roars out with pain, and is taunted by 
the "Chorus," — a party of satyrs whom he has made 
his slaves, and who now rejoice in their deliverance. 



" Chorus. Why make this bawling, Cyclops? 
Cyclops. I am lost ! 

Ch. Thou'rt dirty, anyhow. 

Cyc. Yea, and wretched too ! 

Ch. What ! hast got drunk, and fallen into the tire ? 
Cyc. Noman hath slain me ! 

Ch. Then thou'rt wronged by no man. 

Cyc. Noman hath blinded me ! 



ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS. 71 

Ch. Then thou'rt not blind. 

Cyc. Would ye were so ! — 

Ch. Why, how could no man blind thee ? 

Cyc. Ye mock me. — Where is Noman ? 

Ch. Nowhere, Cyclops. 

Cyc. friends, if ye would know the truth, yon wretch 

Hath been my ruin — gave me drink, and drowned me ! 
Ch. Ay — wine is strong, we know, and hard to deal with. 

The poet Theocritus, in one of his Idylls, gives us 
Polyphemus, before his blindness, i in love with the 
beautiful nymph Galatsea, who, having another lover 
with two eyes in the young shepherd Acis, does not 
encourage the addresses of the Cyclops. This is part 
of his remonstrance : — 

' ' I know, sweet maiden, why thou art so coy ; 
Shaggy and huge, a single eyebrow spans 
From ear to ear my forehead, whence one eye 
Gleams, and an o'er-broad nostril o'er my lip. 
Yet I — this monster — feed a thousand sheep, 
That yield me sweetest draughts at milking-tide. 

But thou mislik'st my hair ? — Well, oaken logs 
Are here, and embers yet a-glow with fire ; 
Burn, if thou wilt, my heart out, and my eye — 
My lonely eye, wherein is my delight." 

— Theocritus, Idyll xi. (Calverley's transl.) 

This love-story of the Cyclops is better known, per- 
haps, to English readers, through Handel's Pastoral, 
' Acis and Galatea.' 

The imprecation of Polyphemus was heard, and 
Ulysses was long to suffer the penalty of his bold 
deed. Yet, but for the weakness of his comrades, 
he might perhaps have escaped it. For, as they 



72 THE ODYSJSEY. 

sailed on over unknown seas, they won the friendship 
of the King of the Winds. He feasted them a whole 
month on his brass-bound island ; and he, too, like all 
the world of gods and men, asked eagerly for the last 
news of the heroes of Troy. So charmed was -ZEolus 
with his guest, that on his departure he presented 
Ulysses with an ox-hide tied with a silver cord, in 
which all the winds were safely confined, save only 
Zephyr, who was left loose to waft the voyagers 
safely home. So for nine days and nights they 
ran straight for Ithaca, Ulysses himself at the helm, 
for he would trust it to no other hand. And now 
they had come in sight of the rocks of their beloved 
island — so near that they could see the smoke go up 
from the herdsmen's camp-fires ; when, overcome with 
long watching, the chief fell asleep upon the deck. 
Then the greed and curiosity of his companions 
tempted them to examine the ox-hide bag. It must 
be some rich treasure, surely, thus carefully tied up and 
stowed away. They opened it ; out rushed the im- 
prisoned blasts, and drove them back in miserable 
plight to the island of iEolus, — much to that monarch's 
astonishment. In vain did Ulysses tell his unlucky 
story, and beg further help from the ruler of the 
storms ; iEolus would have nothing more to do with 
such an ill-starred wretch, upon whom there rested so 
manifestly the curse of heaven, but drove him and his 
companions out to sea again with ignominy. 

A second time the voyagers fell into the hands of can- 
nibals. They moored their ships in the harbour of the 
Laestrygonians, — in the description of which there has 



ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO A LCI NO US. 73 

been lately traced a strong likeness to the bay of Bala- 
clava — 

" A rock-surrounded bay, 
Whence fronting headlands at the mouth outrun, 
Leaving a little narrow entrance-way, 
Wherethrough they drive the vessels one by one." 

These Laestrygonians were a giant race, like the 
Cyclops, and of an equally barbarous character. One 
of the exploring party, whom Ulysses sent to recon- 
noitre, they seized and devoured on the spot, and then 
hurled rocks down on the ships as they lay moored in 
the land-locked harbour, and speared the unfortunate 
crews, " like fish," as they swam from the wrecks. 
Ulysses only had moored outside, and escaped with 
his single ship by cutting his cable. 

Pursuing his sad voyage, he had reached the island 
of iEsea, where dwelt the enchantress Circe " of the 
bright hair," daughter of the Sun. Here he divided 
his small remaining force into two bands, one of which, 
under his lieutenant, Eurylochus, explored the interior 
of the island, while Ulysses and the rest kept guard 
by their ship. Hidden deep in the woods, they came 
upon the palace of Circe. 

" Wolves of the mountain all around the way, 
And lions, softened by the spells divine, 
As each her philters had partaken, lay. 
These cluster round the men's advancing line 
Fawning like dogs, who, when their lord doth dine, 
Wait till he issues from the banquet-hall, 
And for the choice gifts which his hands assign 
Fawn, for he ne'er forgets them — so these all 
Fawn on our friends, whom much the unwonted sights appal. 



74 THE ODYSSEY. 

" Soon at her vestibule they pause, and hear 
A voice of singing from a lovely place, 
Where Circe weaves her great web year by year, 
So shining, slender, and instinct with grace 
As weave the daughters of immortal race." 



The abode of Circe presents quite a different picture 
from the grotto of Calypso.* There, all the beauties 
were those of nature in her untouched luxuriance; here 
we have all the splendour of an Oriental interior, en- 
riched with elaborate art — wide halls of polished marble, 
silver-studded couches, and vessels of gold. 

Throwing wide the shining doors, the enchantress 
gaily bade them enter ; and all, save only the more 
prudent Eurylochus, accepted the invitation. They 
drank of her drugged cup ; then she struck them with 
her wand, and lo ! they became swine in form, yet re- 
taining their human senses. Eurylochus, after long 
watching in vain for the reappearance of his comrades, 
returned alone with his strange tale to his chief, who 
at once set forth to the rescue. On his way through 
the forest, he was suddenly accosted by a fair youth, 
bearing a wand of gold — none other than the god 
Mercury — who gave him a root of wondrous virtue — 



* So sensible was Fenelon of this contrast that, in his romance 
already mentioned, when he describes Calypso's cave, he thinks 
it necessary, like a true Frenchman of the days of the great 
Louis, almost to apologise for the rude simplicity of nature, as 
hardly befitting so enchanting a personage. There were no 
statues, he says, no pictures, no painted ceilings, but the roof 
was set with shells and pebbles, and the want of tapestry was 
supplied by the tendrils of a vine. 



ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS. 75 

u Black, with a milk-white flower, in heavenly tongue 
Called Moly."* 

Armed with this, he can defy all Circe's enchantments. 
She mixed for him the same draught, struck him with 
her wand, and bid him "go herd with his compan- 
ions;" hut potion and spell had lost their power. 
Circe had found her master, and knew it could "be no 
other than " the many-wiled Ulysses," of whose visit 
she had been forewarned. Not even the magic virtues 
of the herb Moly, however, enable him to resist her 
proffered love ; and Ulysses, by his own confession, 
forgot Penelope in the halls of Circe, as afterwards 
in the island of Calypso. It may be offered as his 
apology, that it was absolutely necessary for him to 
make himself agreeable to his hostess, in order to 
obtain from her (as he does at once) the deliverance of 
his companions from her toils; but this does not 
explain his sending for the rest of his crew from the 
ship, and spending a whole year in her society. The 
ingenious critics who insist on shaping a moral allegory 

* So the Spirit, in Milton's " Comus," gives to the brother of 
the Lady a sure antidote to the spell of the enchanter (himself 
represented as a son of Circe) : — 

" Among the rest a small unsightly root, 
But of divine effect, he culled me out ; 
The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on't, 
But in another country, as he said, 
Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil : 
Unknown, and like esteemed, and the dull swain 
Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon ; 
And yet more med'cinal is it than that Moly 
That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave." 



76 THE ODYSSEY. 

out of the story of the Odyssey confess to having 
found a stumbling-block in this point of the narrative. 
It sounds very plausible to say that in Circe is per- 
sonified sensual pleasure ; that those who partake of 
her cup, and are turned into swine, are those who 
brutalise themselves by such indulgences; that the 
herb Moly — black at the root, but white and beautiful 
in the blossom — symbolises " instruction " or " tem- 
perance," by which the temptations of sense are to be 
resisted. Eut Ulysses' victory over the enchantress, 
and his subsequent relations to her, fall in but awk- 
wardly with any moral of any kind. To say that 
Ulysses knows how to indulge his appetites with 
moderation, and therefore escapes the penalties of ex- 
cess — that he is the master of Pleasure, while his com- 
panions become its slaves — is to make the parable 
teach a very questionable form of morality indeed, 
since it represents self-indulgence as praiseworthy, if 
we can only manage to escape the consequences. 

But it was not until Ulysses had been reminded by 
his companions that he was forgetting his fatherland, 
that lie besought his fair entertainer to let him go. 
Eeluctantly she consented, bound by her oath — warn- 
ing him, as they parted, that toil and peril lay before 
him, and that if he would learn his future fate, he 
must visit the Eegions of the Dead, and there consult 
the shade of the great prophet Tiresias. 

Ulysses goes on to describe to the king of the Phae- 
acians his voyage on from the island of iEaea, under 
the favouring cr a les which Circe sends him : — 






ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALC1X0US. 77 

" All the day long the silvery foam we clave, 
Wind in the well-stretched canvas following free, 
Till the sun stooped beneath the western wave, 
And darkness veiled the spaces of the sea. 
Then to the limitary land came we 
Of the sea-river, streaming deep, where dwell, 
Shrouded in mist and gloom continually, 
That people, from sweet light secluded well, 
The dark Cimmerian tribe, who skirt the realms of hell. " 

Who these Cimmerians were is not easily discover- 
able. Their name was held by the Greeks a synonym 
for all that was dark and barbarous in the mists of 
antiquity. It appears, nevertheless, in the earlier 
historians as the appellation of a real people ; some 
rash ethnologists, tempted chiefly by the similarity of 
name, have tried to identify them with the Cymry — 
the early settlers of Wales. The Welsh are notori- 
ously proud of their ancient origin, but it is doubtful 
how far they would accept the poet's description of 
their ancestral darkness, or the neighbourhood to which 
he here assigns them. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE TALE CONTINUED — THE VISIT TO THE SHADES. 

The eleventh, book of the poem, in which Ulysses 
goes down to the Shades to consult the Dead, has been 
considered by some good authorities as a later inter- 
polation into the tale. The solemn grandeur of the 
whole episode is remarked as out of character with the 
light and easy narrative into which it has been woven. 
Be this as it may, the passage has a strong interest in 
itself. It is the solitary glimpse which we have of 
the poet's creed as to the state of disembodied spirits. 
It is at least not in contradiction to the views which 
are disclosed — scantily enough — by the author of the 
Iliad, though here we find them considerably more 
developed. It is a gloomy picture at the best ; and 
we almost cease to wonder at the shrinking from death 
which is so often displayed by the Homeric heroes, 
when we find their future state represented as something 
almost worse, to an active mind, than annihilation. 

" Never the Sun that giveth light to men 
Looks down upon them with his golden eye, 



THE VISIT TO THE SHADES. 79 

Or when he climbs the starry arch, or when 
Slope toward the earth he wheels adown the sky ; 
But sad night weighs upon them wearily. " 

They reached the spot, says Ulysses, described to 
him at parting by Circe, where the dark rivers Acheron 
and Cocytus mix at the entrance into Hades. The 
incantations which she had carefully enjoined were 
duly made ; a black ram and ewe were offered to the 
powers of darkness, and their blood poured into the 
trench which he had dug — " a cubit every way." 



" Forthwith from Erebus a phantom crowd 
Loomed forth, the shadowy people of the dead, — 
Old men, with load of earthly anguish bowed, 
Brides in their bloom cut off, and youths unwed, 
Virgins whose tender eyelids then first shed 
True sorrow, men with gory arms renowned, 
Pierced by the sharp sword on the death -plain red. 
All these flock darkling with a hideous sound, 
Lured by the scent of blood, the open trench around." 



But he had been charged by Circe not to allow the 
ghastly crew to slake their thirst, until he had evoked 
the shade of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, 
who retained his art and his honours even in these 
regions of the dead. So he kept them off with his 
sword, — not suffering even the phantom of his dead 
mother Anticleia, who came among the rest, to taste, 
until the great prophet appeared, leaning on his golden 
staff. 

" To the bloody brink 
He stooped, and with his shadowy lips made shrink 
The sacrificial pool that darkling lay 
Beneath him." 



80 THE ODYSSEY. 

From the lips of Tiresias Ulysses has learnt the future 
which awaits him. On the coast of Sicily he should 
find pasturing the herds and flocks of the Sun : if he 
and his comrades left them uninjured, they should soon 
see again their native Ithaca ; if they laid sacrilegious 
hands on them, he alone should escape, and reach home 
after long suffering. 

The shade of his mother has been sitting meanwhile 
in gloomy silence, eyeing the coveted blood. ^Not until 
she had drank of it might she open her lips to speak, 
or have power to recognise her son. To his eager in- 
quiries as to her own fate and that of his father Laertes 
she made answer that she herself had died of grief, and 
that the old man was wearing out a joyless life in bitter 
anxiety. 

et Therewith she ended, and a deep unrest 
Urged me to clasp the spirit of the dead, 
And fold a phantom to my yearning breast. 
Thrice I essayed, with eager hands out-spread 
Thrice like a shadow or a dream she fled, 
And my hands closed on unsubstantial air. " 

As they talked together, there swept forth out of 
the gloom a crowd of female shapes — the mothers of 
the mighty men of old. There came Tyro, beloved 
by the sea-god Neptune, from whom sprang Eeleus, 
father of Nestor : next followed Antiope, who bore to 
Jupiter Amphion and Zethus, who built the seven-gated 
Thebes; Iphimedeia, mother of the giants Otus and 
Ephialtes, who strove to take heaven itself by storm ; 
Alcmena, Leda, Ariadne, and a crowd of the heroines 
of Greek romance, who had found the loves of the gods 



THE VISIT TO THE SHADES. 81 

more or less disastrous in their earthly lot, and who 
were reaping, in the gloomy immortality which the 
poet assigns them, such consolation as they might 
from knowing themselves the mothers of heroes. 

Here Ulysses would have ended his tale, and for a 
while a charmed silence falls upon his Phseacian audi- 
ence. But the king would hear more. Did he see, 
in the realms of the dead, no one of those renowned 
champions who had fought with him at Troy ? 

Yes — if his host cares to listen, Ulysses can tell him 
a sad tale of some of his old comrades. He saw the 
great Agamemnon there, and heard from his lips the 
treachery of the adulterous Clytemnestra. Antilochus" 
and Patroclus, too, he had recognised, and Ajax ; but 
the latter, retaining in the world below the animosities 
of earthly life, had stood far aloof, and sullenly refused 
to speak a word in answer to his successful rival. The 
only one who reveals anything of the secrets of his 
prison-house is Achilles. He asks of his adventurous 
visitor what has prompted him to risk this intrusion 
into the gloomy dwelling, where the dead live indeed, 
but without thought or purpose, mere shadows of what 
they were. And when Ulysses attempts to comfort 
him with the thought of the deathless glory which 
surrounds his name, the hopelessness of his answer 
sets forth, in the darkest colours, that gloomy view of 
human destiny which breaks out from time to time in 
the creed of the poet, and which belongs to the charac- 
ter of his favourite hero. Whether the Odyssey did or 
did not come from the same hand as the Iliad, at least 
Achilles is the same in both. In the former poem we 
a. c. vol. ii. f 



82 TEE ODYSSEY. 

find him indulging in all the mournful irony of the 
Hebrew Preacher, in his perplexed thought before he 
was led to "the conclusion of the whole matter" — 
complaining, like him, that " one event happeneth to 
all," and that "the wise man dieth as the fool :" that 
he, the bravest and most beautiful of living heroes, 
would have to meet the same lot as his victim Lycaon ; 
so here, in the Odyssey, he adopts the text that "a 
living dog is better than a dead lion : " — 

' ' Rather would I, in the sun's warmth divine, 
Serve some poor churl who drags his days in grief, 
Than the whole lordship of the dead were mine. " 

Such was the immortality to which Paganism con- 
demned even its best and bravest. 

One touching inquiry both Agamemnon and Achilles 
put to their visitor from the upper world. How fare 
their sons 1 Where is Orestes % — asks the great king. 
Did !N"eoptolemus, in the later days of the war, prove 
himself worthy of his father ? — inquires Achilles. 
When he has been assured of this, the shade of the 
mighty hero, well satisfied, 

" Passed striding through the fields of asphodel." 

There is no distinct principle of reward or punishment 
discernible in the regions of the dead, as seen by 
Ulysses. Indeed, anything like happiness in this 
shadowy future seems incompatible with the feelings 
put into the mouth of Achilles. Orion, the mighty 
hunter, appears to enjoy something like the Eed In- 
dian's paradise — pursuing, in those shadowy fields, the 



THE VISIT TO THE SHADES. 83 

phantoms of the wild creatures which he slew on earth ; 
but, with this exception, there is no hint of pleasurable 
interest or occupation for the mighty dead. Punish- 
ments there are for notorious offenders against the 
majesty of the gods : — 

" There also Tantalus in anguish stood, 
Plunged in the stream of a translucent lake ; 
And to his chin welled ever the cold flood. 
But when he rushed, in fierce desire to break 
His torment, not one drop could he partake. 
For as the old man stooping seems to meet 
That water with his fiery lips, and slake 
The frenzy of wild thirst, around his feet, 
Leaving the dark earth dry, the shuddering waves retreat. 

" Also the thick-leaved arches overhead 
Fruit of all savour in profusion flung, 
And in his clasp rich clusters seemed to shed. 
There citrons waved, with shining fruitage hung, 
Pears and pomegranates, olive ever young, 
And the sweet-mellowing fig : but whensoe'er 
The old man, fain to cool his burning tongue, 
Clutched with his fingers at the branches fair, 
Came a strong wind and whirled them skyward through the air." 

" And I saw Sisyphus in travail strong 
Shove with both hands a mighty sphere of stone : 
With feet and sinewy wrists he, labouring long, 
Just pushed the vast globe up, with many a groan ; 
But when he thought the huge mass to have thrown 
Clean o'er the summit, the enormous weight 
Back to the nether plain rolled tumbling down. 
He, straining, the great toil resumed, while sweat 
Bathed each laborious limb, and his brow smoked with heat." 

Both these are examples of punishment inflicted in 
the Shades below, not for an evil life, but for personal 
offences against the sovereign of the gods. Tantalus 



Si THE ODYSSEY. 

had been admitted as a guest to the banquet of the 
immortals, and had stolen their nectar and ambrosia to 
give to his fellow-men. Sisyphus had been, it is true, 
a notorious robber on earth, but the penalty assigned 
him was for the higher crime of betraying an amour of 
Jupiter's which had come to his knowledge. The stone 
of Sisyphus has been commonly taken as an illustration 
of labour spent in vain • but a modern English poet 
has found in it a beautiful illustration of the inde- 
structibility of hope. In one of Lord Lytton's i Tales 
of Miletus/ when Orpheus visits the Shades in search 
of his lost wife — 

" He heard, tho' in the midst of Erebus, 
Song sweet as his Muse-mother made his own ; 
It broke forth from a solitary ghost, 
Who, up a vaporous hill, 

" Heaved a huge stone that came rebounding back, 
And still the ghost upheaved it and still sang. 
In the brief pause from toil while towards the height 
Reluctant rolled the stone, 

" The Thracian asked in wonder, ' Who art thou, 
Voiced like Heaven's lark amidst the night of Hell ? ' 
' My name on earth was Sisyphus/ replied 
The phantom. ' In the Shades 

" I keep mine earthly wit; I have duped the Three.* 
They gave me work for torture ; work is joy. 
Slaves work in chains, and to the clank they sing.' 
Said Orpheus, l Slaves still hope ! * 

" c And could I strain to heave up the huge stone 
Did I not hope that it would reach the height ? 
There penance ends, and dawn Elysian fields.' 
' But if it never reach ? ' 



* The judges of the Dead — Minos, Rhadamanthus, and iEacus. 



TEE VISIT TO TEE SEADES. 85 

" The Thracian sighed, as looming through the mist 
The stone came whirling back. ' Fool,' said the ghost, 
1 Then mine, at worst, is everlasting hope.' 
Again uprose the stone." 

Ulysses confesses that he did not see all he might 
have seen; for, when the pale ghosts in their ten 
thousands crowded round him with wild cries, the hero 
lost courage, fled back to his ship, and hade his com- 
rades loose their cables, and put out at once to sea. 

They passed the island where the twin sisters, the 
Sirens, lay couched in flowers, luring all passing mar- 
iners to their destruction by the fascination of their 
song. Forewarned by Circe, the chief had stopped 
the ears of all his crew with melted wax, and had 
made them bind him to the mast, giving them strict 
charge on no account to release him, however he might 
entreat or threaten — for he himself, true to his passion 
for adventure, would fain listen to these dangerous en- 
chantresses. So, as they drifted close along the shore, 
the Sirens lifted their voices and sang as follows — every 
word of Mr Worsley's translation is Homer's, except the 
single phrase in brackets : — 

" Hither, Odysseus, great Achaian name, 
Turn thy swift keel, and listen to our lay ; 
Since never pilgrim to these regions came 
In black ship [on the azure waves astray], 
But heard our sweet voice ere he sailed away, 
And in his joy passed on, with ampler mind. 
We know what labours were in ancient day 
Wrought in wide Troia, as the gods assigned ; 
We know from land to land all toils of all mankind. 

But the deaf crew rowed on. and not until the sound of 



86 THE ODYSSEY. 

the strain had died away in the distance did they unbind 
their captain, in spite of his angry protests. They pass 
the strait that divides Sicily from Italy, where on either 
hand lurked the monsters Scylla and Charybdis — im- 
personations, it may be, of rocks and whiiipools — but 
which they escaped, with the loss of six out of the 
crew, by help of Circe's warnings and directions. But 
that our own Spenser's ' Faery Queen' is perhaps 
even less known to the majority of English readers 
than the Odyssey of Homer (by grace of popular 
translations), it might be needless to remind them how 
the whole of Sir Guyon's voyage on the " Idle Lake" 
is nothing more or less than a reproduction of this 
portion of Ulysses' adventures.* The five mermaidens, 
who entrap unwary travellers with their melody, address 
the knight as he floats by in a strain which is the echo 
of the Sirens' — 

" thou fayre son of gentle Faery, 
That art in mightie arms most magnifyde 
Above all knights that ever batteill tryde, 
turn thy rudder hitherwarde awhile : 
Here may thy storme-bett vessell safely ryde : 
This is the port of rest from troublous toyle, 
The worldes sweet Inn from pain and wearisome turmoyle." 

The enchantress Acrasia, with her transformed lovers 
— the " seeming beasts who are men in deed " — is but 
a copy from Circe ; while the " Gulf of Greediness " 
yawning on one side of the Lake — 

" That deep engorgeth all this worldes prey " — 

and on the other side the " Eock of Vile Keproach," 

* 'Faery Queen,' Book ii. c. 12. 






THE VISIT TO THE SHADES. 87 

whose fatal magnetic power draws in all who try to 
shun the whirlpool opposite, are the Scylla and Cha- 
rybdis of Homer. 

At length the voyagers reached the shore where 
the oxen of the Sun were pastured. In vain did 
Ulysses, remembering the prophecy of Tiresias, hid 
them steer on and leave the land unvisited. Eu- 
rylochus, his lieutenant, broke out at last into some- 
thing like mutiny. He had some show of reason, 
when he complained of his chief, almost in the 
words of Sir Dinadan to Sir Tristram in the ' Morte 
d' Arthur,' that he was tired of such mad company, and 
would no longer follow a man to whose iron frame the 
toils and dangers which wore out ordinary mortals were 
a mere disport. Seeing that the rest backed Eurylochus 
in his proposal to land and rest, Ulysses was fain to 
give way, after exacting a vow that at least none of 
them should lay sacrilegious hands upon the sacred 
herds, since they had store of corn and wine, the part- 
ing gifts of Circe, on board their vessel. But stress of 
weather detained them in the anchorage a whole month, 
until corn and wine were exhausted, and they had to 
snare birds and catch fish — a kind of food which a 
Greek seaman especially despised — to keep them from 
starving. Then at last, while their chief had with- 
drawn to a quiet spot, and fallen asleep wearied with 
long prayer, Eurylochus persuaded the rest to break 
their vow, and slay the choicest of the oxen. Terrible 
prodigies followed the unhallowed meal \ the skins of 
the slain animals moved and crawled after their slayers, 
and the meat, while roasting on the spits, uttered fearful 



88 THE ODYSSEY. 

cries and groans. One of the old allegorical interpreters 
has drawn from this incident a moral which, however 
fanciful, is not without a certain beauty and apposite- 
ness of illustration — the sins of the wicked, he says, 
dog their steps, and cry aloud against them. When 
next they put to sea, Jupiter raised winds and waves 
to punish them ; for the Sun had threatened that, if 
such insult went unavenged, he would light the hea- 
vens no more, but go down and shine in Hades. 
Their ship was riven by a thunderbolt, and Ulysses 
alone, sole survivor of all his crew, after once more 
narrowly escaping the whirlpool of Charybdis, after 
floating nine days upon the broken mast, was cast 
ashore on the island of Calypso, and there detained 
until his release by the intercession of Minerva, as 
has been told, which had ended in this second ship- 
wreck on the coast of his present entertainers. 



CHAPTER VI. 

ULYSSES* RETURN TO ITHACA. 

The hero, at his departure, is loaded with rich presents 
of honour from his Phseacian hosts. The twelve prin- 
ces of the kingdom each contribute their offering — gold 
and changes of raiment ; the king adds a gold drinking- 
cup of his own, and Queen Arete a mantle and tunic. 
The careful queen also supplies him with a magnificent 
chest, in which she packs his treasures with her own 
royal hands ; and Ulysses secures the whole with a 
" seaman's knot," whose complications will defy the 
uninitiated — a secret which he has learnt from Circe, 
and which he seems to have handed down to modern 
sailors. Thus equipped, he is sent on hoard one of the 
magic galleys, to he conveyed home to his native Ithaca. 
They embark in the evening, and early the next morn- 
ing the crew — apparently in order to give the adven- 
ture the half-ludicrous turn which seems inseparable 
from the Phaeacians — land their passenger, still sound 
asleep, and leave him on shore under an olive-tree, with 
his store of presents heaped beside him. When he 
awakes, he fails to recognise his native island, for Min- 



90 TEE ODYSSEY. 

erva lias spread a mist over it. The goddess herself 
presently accosts him, in the form of a shepherd, and 
listens patiently to a story which the hero invents, with 
his usual readiness, to account for his presence on the 
island. Then she discovers herself, with a somewhat 
ironical compliment on the inveterate craftiness which 
has led him to attempt to impose on the wisest of the 
immortals. She tells him news of his wife and of his 
son, and promises him her help against the accursed 
suitors. She lays her golden wand upon him, and lo ! 
the majestic presence which had touched the maiden 
fancy of Nausicaa, and won him favour in the eyes of 
the Phseacian court (to say nothing of Circe and Calyp- 
* so) has at once . given place 'to the decrepitude of age. 
\The ruddy cheeks grow wrinkled, the bright eyes ' are 
dimmed, the flowing locks turned grey, and Ulysses is, 
to all appearance, an aged beggar, clad in squalid rags. 
Thus disguised, so that none shall recognise him till 
his hour comes, he seeks shelter, by direction of the 
goddess, with his own swineherd Eumaeus. 

Eumseus is one of the most characteristic personages 
in the poem, and has given the most trouble to the 
poet's various critics. He occupies a sort of forester's 
lodge in the woods, where the vast herds of swine be- 
longing to the absent king are fed by day, and carefully 
lodged at night. Though he is but a keeper of swine, 
Homer applies to him continually the epithets " god- 
like," and " chief of men," which he commonly uses 
only of territorial lords such as Ulysses and Menelaus. 
He not only has subordinates in his employ, but an 
attendant slave, whom he has purchased with his own 



ULYSSES' RETURN TO ITHACA. 91 

money ; and he so far exercises an independent right 
of property in the animals -which are under his care as 
to kill and dress them — two at a time, such is the lavish 
hospitality of the age — to feast the stranger-guest who 
has now come to him. It may he straining a point to 
see in him, as one of the most genial of Homeric critics 
does, " a genuine country gentleman of the age of 
Homer ; " hut his position, so far as it is possihle to 
compare it with anything at all in modern social life, 
appears something like that of the agricultural steward 
of a large landed proprietor, with whom his relations, 
though strictly subordinate, are of a highly confidential 
and friendly character. The charge of the swine would 
be a much more important office in an age when, as, is 
plain from many passages both in the Iliad and the 
Odyssey, the flesh of those animals held a place of 
honour at the banquets of chiefs and kings : and as we 
find that even the sons of a royal household did not 
think the keeping of sheep beneath their dignity, 
so the care of other animals would b,y no means imply 
a menial position. Eumseus, indeed, turns out to be 
himself of princely birth — stolen in his childhood by 
a treacherous nurse from the island where his father 
' was king, sold by Phoenician merchants to Laertes in 
Ithaca, and brought up in his household almost as a 
son, and regarding the lost Ulysses "as an elder bro- 
ther." Very loyal is he to the house of his benefactors ; 
prefacing his meal by a prayer that his lord may yet 
return in safety, and grieving specially that the lady 
Penelope, in her present troubles, has seldom the op- 
portunity to see or speak with him in the kindly inter- 



92 THE ODYSSEY. 

course of old. The cordial and simple relations between 
master and servant — even though, the servant was com- 
monly nothing more or less than a purchased slave- 
are a striking feature, very pleasant to dwell upon, in 
these Homeric poems. They remind us, as Homer 
does so often, of similar pictures in the sacred narrative 
of the gentler affections which redeemed so often the 
curse of slavery — of the little captive Israelite maiden 
whose concern for her Syrian master led to his cure, 
and of the faithful steward, "horn in the house" of 
Abraham, whom the childless patriarch once thought 
to make his heir. 

Eumseus entertains the stranger right hospitably — 
warning him, at the same time, not to pretend, as others 
have often done in the hope of reward, to bring tidings 
of the lost Ulysses. His guest's own story he will be 
glad to hear. The hero is always ready at narrative, 
whether the tale is to be fact or fiction. At present 
he chooses fiction ; he gives his listener an imaginary 
history of his past life, as a Cretan chief wdio had seen 
much good service in many lands, especially under 
King Idomeneus at Troy, but who had met with a 
succession of disasters since. Of course he had seen 
and known Ulysses ; had heard of him since the fall 
of Troy ; and he offers his host a wager that he will 
yet return. Eumasus will hear nothing of such flatter- 
ing hopes ; by this time his men are coming in from 
the field, and when the swine are safely housed, supper 
and bedtime follow. But the night is bitter cold, and 
Ulysses has nothing but his beggar's rags. He in- 
directly begs a covering from his host by an ingenious 



ULYSSES' RETURX TO ITHACA. 93 

story, very characteristic of the style of the lighter epi- 
sodes of the Odyssey. He relates an adventure of his 
own while lying in ambush, one winter night, under 
the walls of Troy. Dr Maginn's translation of this 
passage, in the old English ballad style, though some- 
what free, preserves fairly the spirit and humour of the 
original : — 

11 Oh ! were I as young and as fresh and as strong 
As when under Troy, brother soldiers among, 
In ambush as captains were chosen to lie 
Odysseus and King Menelaus and I ! 

" They called me as third, and I came at the word, 
And reached the high walls that the citadel gird ; 
When under the town we in armour lay down 
By a brake in the marshes with weeds overgrown. 
The night came on sharp, bleak the north wind did blow, 
And frostily cold fell a thick shower of snow. 

" Soon with icicles hoar every shield was frozen o'er ; 
But they who their cloaks and their body-clothes wore 
The night lightly passed, secure from the blast, 
Asleep with their shields o'er their broad shoulders cast ; 
But I, like a fool, had my cloak left behind, 
Not expecting to shake in so piercing *a wind. 

" My buckler and zone — nothing more — had I on ; 
But when the third part of the night-watch was gone, 
And the stars left the sky, with my elbow then I 
Touched Odysseus, and spoke to him, lying close by — 
1 Noble son of Laertes, Odysseus the wise, 
I fear that alive I shall never arise. 

" ' In this night so severe but one doublet I wear — 
Deceived by a god— and my cloak is not here, 
And no way I see from destruction to flee.' 
But soon to relieve me a project had he. 
In combat or council stiU prompt was his head, 
And into my ear thus low whisp'ring he said : — 



94 TEE ODYSSEY. 

" ' Let none of the band this your need understand; 
Keep silent.' Then, resting his head on his hand, — 
' Friends and comrades of mine/ he exclaimed, ' as a sign, 
While I slept has come o'er me a dream all divine. 
It has warned me how far from the vessels we lie, 
And that some one should go for fresh force to apply ; 

" ( And his footsteps should lead, disclosing our need, 
To King Agamemnon, our chieftain, with speed.' 
Thoas rose as he spoke, flung off his red cloak, 
And running, his way with the message he took ; 
While, wrapt in his garment, I pleasantly lay 
Till the rise of the golden- throned queen of the day. 

' ' i If I now were as young, and as fresh, and as strong, 
Perhaps here in the stables you swine-herds among 
Some a mantle would lend, as the act of a friend, 
Or from the respect that on worth should attend ; 
But small is the honour, I find, that is paid 
To one who, like me, is so meanly arrayed.'" 

— (Maginn's i Homeric Ballads.') 

The self-laudation which the hero, speaking in an- 
other person, takes the opportunity to introduce, is in 
perfect keeping with his character throughout. 

The hint so broadly given is quite successful, and 
Eumaeus provides his guest with some warm coverings 
and a place near the tire ; but he himself will not sleep 
so far from his charge. Wrapped in a mighty wind- 
proof cloak, he takes up his quarters for the night 
under the shelter of a rock, hard by the lair of his 
swine. 



CHAPTEE VII. 

THE RETURN OF TELEMACHUS FROM SPARTA. 

The story returns to Telemachus, whom we left at 
Sparta. His stay at that court has been prolonged a 
whole month, for which the excuse, we must suppose, 
is to be found in the hospitalities of Menelaus and the 
fascinations of Helen. jSTo wonder that his guardian 
goddess admonishes him in a dream that, under his 
present circumstances, such delays are dangerous. Pen- 
elope has a hard time of it in his absence, even her 
father pressing her to marry some one of her suitors. 
May, Minerva more than hints — though we beg our 
readers not to accept such an insinuation against Penel- 
ope, even on the authority of a goddess — that Eurym- 
achus, one of the richest of the rivals, is beginning to 
find favour in her eyes. Telemachus is roused once 
more to action : awakening his young friend Pisistratus, 
he proposes that they should set out on their return at 
once — before the day breaks. The son of the old 
I Horse-tamer " sensibly reminds him that driving in 
the dark is very undesirable, and it is agreed to wait 
for the morning. Menelaus, with genuine courtesy, 



96 THE ODYSSEY. 

refrains from any attempt to detain his guests longer 
than seems agreeable to themselves. A portion of his 
speech, as rendered by Pope, has passed into a popular 
maxim as to the true limits of hospitality, and has been 
quoted, no doubt, by many, with very little idea that 
they were indebted to Homer for the precept — 

" True friendship's laws are by this rule exprest — 
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest." 

Another maxim of the hospitable Spartan has long 
been adopted by Englishmen — that all wise men, who 
have a long day's journey before them, should lay in a 
substantial breakfast. This the travellers do, and then 
prepare to mount their chariot ; Telemachus bearing 
with him, as the parting gift of his royal host, a bowl 
of silver wondrously chased, " the work of Vulcan " — 
too fair to come from any mortal hand — which Mene- 
laus had himself received from the King of Sidon ; 
while Helen adds an embroidered robe "that glistened 
like a star," one of many which she has woven with her 
own hands, which she begs him to keep to adorn his 
bride on her marriage-day. Even as they part, lo ! 
there is an omen in the sky — an eagle bearing off a 
white goose in her talons. Who shall expound it 1 
Menelaus, who is appealed to, is no soothsayer. Helen 
alone can unlock the riddle : — 

" Just as this eagle came from far away, 
Beared in the bleak rock, nursling of the hill, 
And in the stormy ravin of his wild will 
Seized on the white goose, delicately bred, — 
Sp brave Ulysses, after countless ill, 
Comes from afar off, dealing vengeance dread." 



RETURN OF TELEMACHUS FROM SPARTA. 97 

Telemachus blesses her for the happy interpretation, 
and promises that, should the word come true, he will 
worship the fair prophetess in Ithaca as nothing less 
than a divinity. Whether or no he made good his 
vow the poet does not tell us. Worse mortals have 
been canonised both in ancient and modern calendars. 
And whether Helen was honoured thus in Ithaca or 
not, she certainly was at Sparta, where we are told that 
she displayed her new powers as a divinity once at 
least in a very appropriate manner — transforming a 
child of remarkable ugliness, at the prayer of its nurse, 
into a no less remarkable beauty. 

The young men make their first evening halt at 
Pherse, as before, and reach Nestor's court at Pylos next 
day. Telemachus insists on driving straight to the bay 
where his patient crew still await him with the galley 
— for he knows old Nestor will try to detain him, out 
of kindness, if he once set foot again in the palace — 
and instantly on his arrival they hoist sail for home. 
They round the peninsula in the night, and with the 
morning's dawn they sight the spiry peaks of Ithaca. 
The crew moor the vessel in a sheltered bay, while 
Telemachus — to escape the ambuscade which he knows 
to have been laid for him — makes straight for the 
swineherd's lodge, instead of entering the town. As 
he draws near the threshold, the watch-dogs know his 
step, and run out to greet him ; Eumseus himself, in his 
delight at the meeting, drops from his hands the bowl 
of wine which he was carefully mixing as a morning 
draught for his disguised guest, and falls on his young 
lord's neck, kissing him, and weeping tears of joy. 

a. c. vol. ii. G 



98 THE ODYSSEY. 

" Thou, Telemachus, my life, my light, 
Returnest ; yet my soul did often say 
That never, never more should I have sight 
Of thy sweet face, since thou didst sail away. 
Enter, dear child, and let my heart allay 
Its yearnings ; newly art thou come from far : 
Thou comest all too seldom — fain to stay 
In the thronged city, where the suitors are, 
Silently looking on while foes thy substance mar.' 



Ulysses preserves his disguise, and rises from his 
seat to offer it to the young chief. But Telemachus, 
like all Homer's heroes, is emphatically a gentleman ; 
and he will not take an old man's place, though 
that man be but a poor wayfarer clad in rags. When 
he has broken his fast at his retainer's table, he 
would know from him Avho the stranger is. Eumseus 
repeats the fictitious history which he has heard 
from Ulysses, and Telemachus promises the ship- 
wrecked wanderer relief and protection. He sends 
Eumasus to announce his own safe return to Penelope ; 
and when the father and son are left alone, suddenly 
Minerva appears — visible only to Ulysses and to the 
dogs, who cower and whine at the supernatural pre- 
sence — and bids him discover himself to his son. The 
beggar's rags fall off, a royal robe takes their place, and 
he resumes all the majesty of presence which he had 
worn before. But Telemachus does not recognise the 
father whom he has never known ; the sudden trans- 
formation rather suggests to him some heavenly visitant. 
He was but an infant when Ulysses went to Troy ; and 
even when his father assures him of his identity, he 



RETURN OF TELEMACHUS FROM SPARTA. 99 

will not "believe. There is a quiet sadness, but no 
reproach, in the hero's reply : — 

" Other Odysseus cometh none save me. 
Behold me as I am ! By earth and sea 
Scourged with affliction, in the twentieth year, 
Safe to mine own land at the last I flee." 

It is long before either, in their first emotion, can 
find words to tell their story, Ulysses takes his son 
fully into his counsels, and charges him to keep the 
news of his return as yet a secret even from his mother, 
until they two shall discover who among the house- 
hold can be trusted to aid them in the extermination 
of the intruders and their powerful retinue. He knows 
that his day of vengeance is come at last, and nothing 
less than this will satisfy him. Telemachus has some 
timorous misgivings, according to his nature — What 
are they two against so many? But Ulysses knows 
that the gods are on his side — Minerva and the Father 
of the gods himself; or shall we say with the alle- 
gorists, in this case, the Counsels of Heaven and the 
Justice of Heaven 1 There is a grand irony in the 
question which he puts to his son — " Thinkest thou 
these allies will suffice, or shall we seek for other 
helpers]" 



CHAPTEE VIII. 

ULYSSES REVISITS HIS PALACE. 

Great is the consternation amongst the riotous crew in 
the palace, when they find that Telemachus has escaped 
their toils, and has returned ; and great the joy of 
Penelope when she hears this good news from Eumasus, 
which yet she hardly believes, until it is confirmed by 
a visit from her son in person. The suitors receive 
him with feigned courtesy, though some among them 
have already determined on his assassination. The 
swineherd follows to the palace, bringing with him, by 
command of Telemachus, the seeming beggar — for 
Ulysses has undergone a second transformation, and is 
once more an aged man in mean apparel. As a poor 
wanderer, dependent on public charity, he is sure to 
find that ready admittance into the royal precincts 
which is so necessary for carrying out his plans of ven- 
geance, without raising the suspicions of the present 
occupants. On the way they are met by Melan- 
thius the goatherd, whose character stands in marked 
contrast to that of Eumaeus. He is utterly faithless 
to his absent master's interests, and has become 



ULYSSES REVISITS HIS PALACE. 101 

the ready instrument of his enemies. With mock- 
ing insolence he jeers at Eumaeus and his humble 
acquaintance, and even goes so far as to spurn the 
latter with his foot. Ulysses fully justifies his 
character for patience and endurance ; though for a 
moment he does debate in his heart the alternative, 
whether he should break the skull of the scoffer with 
his club, or lift him from his feet and dash his brains 
out on the ground. As he draws near the gates of his 
own palace he espies another old retainer, of a different 
type, belonging to a race noted in all lands and ages 
for its fidelity. There lies on the dunghill, dying of 
old age, disease, and neglect, his dog Argus — the com- 
panion of many a long chase in happier days. The dog 
has all Eumseus's loyalty, and more than his discern- 
ment. His instinct at once detects his old master, even 
through the disguise lent by the goddess of wisdom. 
Before he sees him, he knows his voice and step, and 
raises his ears — 

" And when he marked Odysseus in the way, 
And could no longer to his lord come near, 
Fawned with his tail, and drooped in feeble play 
His ears. Odysseus turning wiped a tear." 

Eustathius (who made none the worse archbishop be- 
cause he was a thorough lover of Homer) has remarked, 
somewhat pertinently, that the fate of his dog draws 
from the imperturbable Ulysses the tears which he 
never sheds for any thought of Penelope. But such 
lesser pathetic incidents have often, in actual life, a 
stronger emotional effect than is produced by the deeper 



102 THE ODYSSEY. 

affections.* But lie masters his emotion, for this is no 
time to betray himself, and follows Eumeeus through the 
entrance-doors. It is poor Argus's last effort, and the 
old hound turns and dies — 

" Just having seen Odysseus in the twentieth year," 

The story is told by the Greek poet with somewhat 
more prolixity of detail than suits our modern notions 
of the pathetic, but the pathos of the incident itself is 
of the simplest and purest kind. 

In beggar's guise Ulysses enters his own hall, and 
makes his rounds of the party who sit there at table, 
soliciting some contribution of broken meat to his 
wallet. None is so hard of heart as to refuse, -except 
Antinous. In vain does Ulysses compliment him on 
his princely beauty, and remind him of the uncertainty 
of fortune, as evidenced by his own present case : — 

" Once to me also sorrow came not near, 
And I had riches and a noble name, 
And to the wandering poor still gave, whoever came." 

" Legions of slaves and many thousand things 
I held, which God doth on the great bestow — 
All that the ownership of large wealth brings. 
But Zeus the Thunderer, for he willed it so, 
Emptied my power, and sent a wave of woe. " 

Antinous haughtily bids him stand off, and when 
Ulysses expresses his wonder that in so fair a body 

* When Adam Bede speaks roughly to his mother, and 
then tenderly to his dog Gyp, the author thus moralises on his 
inconsistency: "We are apt to be kinder to the brutes that 
love us than to the women that love us. Is it because the brutes 
are dumb ? " 



ULYSSES REVISITS HIS PALACE. 103 

should dwell so mean a spirit, hurls a stool at hirn. 
The blow does not shake the strong frame of Ulysses, 
who moves to the doorway, lays down his wallet, and 
lifts his voice in solemn imprecation to the Powers on 
high who protect the stranger and the poor : — 

" Hear me, ye suitors of the queen divine ! 
Men grieve not for the wounds they take in fight, 
Defending their own wealth, white sheep or kine ; 
But me (bear witness !) doth Antinous smite 
Only because I suffer hunger's bite, 
Fount to mankind of evils evermore. 
Now may Antinous, ere his nuptial night, 
If there be gods and furies of the poor, 
Die unavenged, unwept, upon the palace-floor." 

Even some amongst the young man's companions are 
horrified by this reckless violation of the recognised 
laws of charity and hospitality. One of them speaks 
out in strong rebuke : — 

" Not to thine honour hast thou now let fall, 
Antinous, on the wandering poor this blow. 
Haply a god from heaven is in our hall, 
And thou art ripe for ruin : I bid thee know, 
Gods in the garb of strangers to and fro 
Wander the cities, and men's ways discern ; 
Yea, through the wide earth in all shapes they go, 
Changed, yet the same, and with their own eyes learn 
How live the sacred laws— who hold them, and who spurn." 

This is one of those noble passages in which the 
creed of the poet soars far above his mythology. The 
god who is the avenger of broken oaths, and the pro- 
tector of the poor and the stranger, though he bears the 
name of Zeus or Jupiter, is a power of very different 
type from the Euler of Olympus, who indulges his 



104 TEE ODYSSEY. 

sensual passions in base amours with mortals, — who in 
the Iliad is perpetually engaged in domestic wrangles 
with his queen, and even in the Odyssey wreaks a weak 
vengeance on Ulysses merely to gratify the spite of 
Neptune. 

" Meanwhile Telemachus sat far apart, 
Feeding on fire ; and deeper and more drear 
Grew the sharp pang, that he saw stricken there 
His own dear father, and the flower of kings. 
Yet from his eyelids he let fall no tear, 
But, filled in soul with dark imaginings, 
Silently waved his head, and hrooded evil things." 

Additional insults await the hero in his own hall. 
There comes from the town a sturdy beggar, known as 
Irus — " the messenger " — by a kind of parody on the 
name of the rainbow goddess, Iris, who performs the 
same office for the immortals. Jealous of a rival 
mendicant, such as Ulysses appears, he threatens to 
drive him from the hall. Ulysses quietly warns him 
to keep his hands off — there is room enough for both. 
The young nobles shout with delight at a quarrel 
which promises such good sport, and at once form a 
ring for the combatants, and undertake to see fair 
play. When the disguised king strips off his squalid 
rags for the boxing-match, and discovers the brawny 
chest and shoulders for which he was remarkable, Irus 
trembles at the thought of encountering him. But it 
is too late : with a single blow Ulysses breaks his jaw, 
and drags him out into the courtyard. The revellers 
now hail the conqueror with loud applause, and award 
him the prize of victory — a goat-paunch filled with 






ULYSSES REVISITS HIS PALACE. 105 

mince-nieat and blood, the prototype, apparently, both 
of the Scotch haggis and the English black-pudding. 
Amphinomus — who has already shown something of a 
nobler nature than the rest — adds a few words of gen- 
erous sympathy : he sees in the wandering mendicant 
one who has known better days, and pledges him in a 
cup of wine, with a hope that brighter fortunes are 
yet in store. Ulysses is touched with pity for the 
fate which the young man's evil companions are in- 
evitably drawing on him. He had heard, he tells him, 
of his father, Misus — had known him, doubtless, in 
fact — a wise and good man ; such ought the son to be. 
He adds a voice of ominous warning, tinged with that 
saddened view of man at his best estate which continu- 
ally breaks forth, even amidst the lighter passages of 
the poet. 

" Earth than a man no poorer feebler thing 
Bears, of all creatures that here breathe or move ; 
Who, while the gods lend health, and his knees string, 
Boasts that no sorrow he is born to prove. 
But when the gods assail him from above, 
Then doth he bear it with a bitter mind, 
Dies without help, or liveth against love. " 



Penelope now descends from her chamber for a mo- 
ment into the hall, to have speech with her son. The 
goddess Minerva has shed on her such radiant grace 
and beauty, that her appearance draws forth passionate 
admiration from Eurymachus. She does but taunt 
him in reply : most suitors, she says, at least bring 
presents in their hand; these of hers do but rob, 
where others give freely. They are all stung sufficiently 



106 THE ODYSSEY. 

by her words to produce at once from their stores 
some costly offerings — embroidered robes, chains and 
brooches and necklaces of gold and electrum. The 
queen, after the practical fashion of the age, is not too 
disdainful to carry them off to her chamber; while 
Ulysses — as indeed seems more in accordance with his 
character — secretly rejoices to see his wife thus " spoil- 
ing the Egyptians." Some commentators have apolo- 
gised for this seeming meanness on the part of Penelope 
by the explanation, that she does it to inspire them 
with false hopes of her choosing one of them now at 
last for her husband, and so lulling them into a false 
security in order to insure their easier destruction. 
But it is best to take the moral tone of these early 
poems honestly, as we find it, and not attempt to force 
it into too close agreement with our own. 

After some further acts of insult, still borne with a 
wrathful endurance by Ulysses, the company quit the 
hall, as usual, for the night. Then Penelope descends 
again from her chamber, and sitting by the hearth, 
bids a chair be set also for the wandering stranger : 
she will hear his tale. He represents himself to her 
as the brother of King Idomeneus of Crete, and as 
having once in his brother's absence entertained the 
great Ulysses in his halls. To Penelope's eager ques- 
tions, by which she seeks to test his veracity, he 
answers by describing not so much the person of her 
husband as his distinctive dress. The queen recog- 
nises, in this description, the curiously-embroidered 
mantle which she had worked for him, and the golden 



ULYSSES REVISITS BIS PALACE. 107 

clasp, " linked with, twin stars," which she had fastened 
with her own hands when he parted from her to go to 
Troy. She breaks into floods of tears at the recollec- 
tion ; while the disguised Ulysses sets his eyes hard, 
"as though they were of horn or steel," and checks 
his rising tears. He comforts her with the assurance 
that he brings recent news of her hero — of his shipwreck 
and visit to the Phaeacians ; that he is even now on 
his way to Ithaca, last heard of in the neighbouring 
island of Dulichium, within easy reach of home ; nay, 
this very year, he would be content to pledge himself, 
Ulysses shall stand once more in his own halls. Incred- 
ulous, yet thankful for the comfort, the queen orders 
the wanderer to be taken to the bath, and entertained 
as an honoured guest. But he refuses all attendance 
save that of the aged Eurycleia. She marks with 
wonder his likeness to her absent master; but such 
resemblance, he assures her, has been noticed fre- 
quently by others. As she bathes his feet, her eyes 
fall on a well-remembered scar, left by a wound re- 
ceived from a boar's tusk in his youth while hunting 
on Mount Parnassus with his grandsire Autolycus.* 

* From this maternal ancestor Ulysses might have inherited 
a large share of the subtlety which distinguished him. Autoly- 
cus was the reputed son of Hermes (Mercury) — the god of thieves 
— and did not in that point disgrace his blood. He was said to 
have the power of so transforming all stolen property, that the 
owner could not possibly recognise it. Shakespeare borrows the 
name, and some of the qualities, for one of his characters in the 
I Winter's Tale ' — " Autolycus, a rogue," as he stands in the list 
of dramatis persona, who professes himself "not naturally 
honest, but sometimes so by chance." 



108 THE ODYSSEY. 

The old nurse doubts no longer. She lets the foot fall 
heavily, and upsets the hath. 

" Surely thou art Ulysses — yes, thou art — 
My darling child, and I not knew my king 
Till I had handled thee in every part ! " 

He puts his hand upon her throat, and forcibly 
checks her outcry; his purpose is not to be known 
openly as yet, for he feels there are few, even of his 
own household, whom he can trust. He charges her 
— even on pain of death, much as he loves her — to 
keep his secret; then, refusing all softer accommoda- 
tion, he lies down in the vestibule on a couch of bull- 
hide, not sleeping, but nursing his wrath in a fever of 
wakefulness. 



CHAPTEE IX. 



THE DAY OF RETRIBUTION. 

The morrow is a festival of Apollo. It is kept by the 
riotous crew in the halls of Ulysses with more than their 
usual revelry. The disguised hero himself, feeding at 
a small table apart by command of Telemachus, is still 
subject to their insults. But portents are not wanting 
of their impending doom. In the midst of the feast 
Minerva casts them into fits of ghastly laughter; the 
meat which they are eating drips with gore ; and the 
seer Theoclymenus — a refugee under the protection of 
Telemachus — who has been of late their unwilling 
companion, sees each man's head enveloped in a misty 
darkness, and the whole court and vestibule thronged 
with ghostly shapes. He cries out in affright, and 
tells them what sight he sees ; but they only answer 
him with mockery, and threaten to drive him forth as 
one who has lost his wits. After warning them of the 
fate which he foresees awaiting them, he quits the com- 
pany. They turn upon Telemachus, and taunt him 
with his sorry choice of guests : first yon lazy dis- 
reputable vagabond, and now this prating would-be 



110 THE ODYSSEY. 

soothsayer. The young man makes no, reply, but 
watches his father anxiously ; and Ulysses still bides 
his time. 

The queen meanwhile has bethought her of a new 
device, to put off yet awhile the evil day in which she 
must at length make her choice amongst her importu- 
nate lovers. She unlocks an inner chamber where the 
treasures of the house are stored, and draws from its 
case Ulysses' bow, the gift of his dead friend Iphitus, 
which he had not taken with him to Troy. Before she 
carries it down, she lays it fondly on her knees, and weeps 
as she thinks of its absent master. One cunning feat 
she remembers which her hero was wont to perform — 
to drive an arrow straight through the hollow rings of 
twelve axe-heads set up in a line. "Whichsoever of 
her suitors can bend the strong bow, and send a shaft 
right through the whole row of twelve, like the lost 
Ulysses, that man she will follow, however reluctantly, 
as her future lord. She has more than a lingering 
hope, we may be sure, that one and all will fail in a 
trial so manifestly difficult. They would refuse the 
ordeal, but for Antinous. Confident in his own powers, 
he hopes to succeed — he knows the rest will fail. 
They, out of shame, accept the test. Telemachus 
himself fixes the weapons firmly in the earth in a true 
and even line, a task in itself of no small difficulty, 
but which he performs with such skill as to win the 
admiration of the whole party. He claims the right to 
make trial first himself, in the hope to prove himself 
his father's true son. Thrice he draws the bow-string, 
but not yet to its right extent. As he is making a fourth 



TEE DAY OF RETRIBUT10X. Ill 

attempt, sanguine of success, he meets a look from his 
father which checks his hand. Ulysses foresees that 
should his son succeed where the others fail, and so 
claim what they are really seeking, the royal power of 
Ithaca, the whole band might suddenly unite against 
him, and so frustrate his present scheme of vengeance. 
Keluctantly, at his father's sign, the youth lays down 
the bow, and professes to lament the weakness of his 
degenerate hand. One after another the rival princes 
in turn strive to bend it, but in vain ; even Antinous 
and Eurymachus, notably the best among them, fail to 
move the string, though the bow is warmed by the fire 
and rubbed well with melted fat to make it more pliable. 
Antinous finds plausible excuse for the failure — they 
have profaned the festival of Apollo by this contest ; it 
shall be renewed under better auspices on the morrow. 
Then the seeming beggar (who meanwhile has made 
himself known as their true lord to Eumaeus and another 
faithful retainer, the herdsman Philcetius) makes request 
that he may try his hand upon this wondrous bow. 
Loud and coarse is the abuse which Antinous and his 
fellows shower upon him for his audacity; but Te- 
lemachus exerts the authority in his mother's house 
which his uninvited guests seem never quite to make 
up their minds to dispute when it is firmly claimed, 
and the weapon is given into the hands of its true 
owner. He handles it gently and lovingly, turning it 
over and over to see whether it has in any way suffered by 
time or decay, and brings notes from the tight-strained 
bow-string, " shrill and sweet as the voice of the swal- 
low." At last he fits an arrow to the notch, and, not 



112 THE ODYSSEY. 

deigning even to rise from his seat to make the effort, 
draws it to its full stretch, and sends the shaft right 
through the whole line of axe-heads. It is the imme- 
diate prelude to the bloody tragedy which follows — 

" ' Behold, the mark is hit, 
Hit without labour ! the old strength cleaves fast 
Upon me, and my bones are stoutly knit — 
Not as the suitors mock me in their scornful wit. 

u ' Now is it time their evening meal to set 
Before the Achaians, ere the sun go down. 
And other entertainment shall come yet, 
Dance and the song, which are the banquet's crown.' 
He spake, and with his eyebrows curved the frown. 
Seizing his sword and spear Telemachus came, 
Son of Odysseus, chief of high renown, 
And, helmeted with brass like fiery flame, 
Stood by his father's throne and waited the dire aim. 

" Stript of his rags then leapt the godlike king 
On the great threshold, in his hand the bow 
And quiver, filled with arrows of mortal sting. 
These with a rattle he rained down below, 
Loose at his feet, and spake among them so : 
' See, at the last our matchless bout is o'er ! 
Now for another mark, that I may know 
If I can hit what none hath hit before, 
And if Apollo hear me in the prayer I pour ! '" 

The philosopher Plato, who did not spare the poet 
occasionally in his criticisms, speaks of this passage as 
worthy of all admiration. We have here the primitive 
type, since worked out into countless shapes, of the 
" situations " and " discoveries" which abound in mo- 
dern romance and drama. 

Ulysses aims the first arrow at Antinous. It pierces 
him in the throat as he is raising a goblet to his lips, and 



TEE DAY OF RETRIBUTION. 113 

he falls backward in the agonies of death, spilling the 
untasted wine upon the floor ; thus giving occasion (so 
says Greek tradition) to that which has now become a 
common English proverb — " There's many a slip 'twixt 
the cup and the lip." * His comrades stand aghast for 
a moment, not certain whether the shot be deliberate or 
merely accidental. Ulysses sets them at rest on that 
point by declaring himself and his purpose. They look 
round the hall for the arms which usually hang upon 
the walls, but these have been secretly removed during 
the previous night by Ulysses and his son. Euryrna- 
chus, who has more plausible rhetoric at his command 
than the others, now endeavours to make terms. An- 
tinous, he confesses, has well deserved his fate — he had 
plotted against the life of Telemachus ; but for himself 
and the rest, now that the king has come to his own 
again, they will submit themselves, and pay such fine 
as shall amply satisfy him for the despoiling of his 
goods. Ulysses scornfully rejects all such compromise. 
Then, at Eurymachus' call, the boldest of the party draw 
their knives and make a rush upon him. But a second 
arrow from the terrible bow strikes Eurymachus through 
the breast before he reaches him ; Amphinomus falls by 
the spear of Telemachus as soon as he gets within range ; 
and while the father, backed by his two retainers, holds 
the rest at bay — rather, we must suppose, by the terror 
of his presence than the actual use of his bow — the son 
rushes off to find arms for the little party. Ulysses 
plies his arrows till they are exhausted, and then the 
four together continue the unequal combat with the 

* IIoAAa /JLera^v TreAe* kvXlkos koll ^e/A.eos &Kpov. 
a. c. vol. ii. H 



114 THE ODYSSEY. 

spears now brought by Telemachus. The details of the 
work of retribution, like some of the long slaughter-lists 
in the Iliad, sufficiently interesting to an audience for 
whom war was the great game of human life, are scarcely 
so to modern and more fastidious readers. The hero, 
like all heroes of romance, performs deeds which in a 
mere prosaic view would appear impossibilities. Suffice 
it to say, that with the Goddess of Wisdom as an ally 
(who appears once more under the form of Mentor), the 
combat ends in the slaughter of the whole band of in- 
truders, even though they are partially supplied with 
arms by the treacherous goatherd, who brings them from 
the armoury which Telemachus has carelessly left open. 
A graze upon the wrist of Telemachus, and a slight 
flesh-wound where the spear of one of the enemy "wrote 
on the shoulder " of the good swineherd Eumaeus, are 
the only hurts received by their party in the combat. 
The vengeance of the hero is implacable ; otherwise it 
were not heroic, in the Homeric sense. Not content 
with the utter extermination of the men who have 
usurped his palace, harassed his wife, and insulted his 
son, he hangs up also their guilty paramours among the 
women-servants, who have joined them in defiling his 
household gods ; first, however, making them swill and 
scour clean the blood-stained hall which has been the 
scene of the slaughter. The traitorous goatherd Melan- 
thius is by the same stern orders miserably lopped of 
ears, and nose, and limbs, before death releases him. 
We find the same pitiless cruelty towards his enemies 
in the hero of the Odyssey as in the hero of the Iliad. 
Yet the poet would teach us that the vengeance of 



THE DAY OF RETRIBUTIOX. 115 

Ulysses is but the instrument of the divine justice. 
Like Moses or Joshua, he is but the passionless execu- 
tor of the wrath of heaven ; while, still to continue the 
parallel, the merciless character of the retribution takes 
its colour from the ferocity of the age. When the 
aged Eurycleia, who as yet alone of the women of 
the household knows the secret of his return, comes 
down and sees the floor strewn with the bloody corpses, 
she is about to raise a shout of triumph. But the king 
checks her : — 

" Nurse, with a mute heart this my vengeance hail ! 
Not holy is it o'er the slain to boast. 
These Heaven and their own crimes have brought to bale ; 
Since of all strangers, from earth's every coast, 
No man was honoured of this godless host, 
Nor good nor evil, whosoe'er they knew — 
And with their souls they pay the fatal cost." 



CHAPTEE X. 

THE RECOGNITION BY PENELOPE. 

Penelope, far off in her chamber, has not heard the 
tumult, for the doors "between the men's and women's 
apartments had been carefully locked by Eumseus, by 
his lord's order. Even when the nurse rushes up to 
her with the tidings that Ulysses himself has returned, 
and made this terrible lustration of his household, she 
yet remains incredulous. The riotous crew may have 
met their deserved fate, but the hand that has slain 
them must be that of some deity, not of Ulysses. Yet 
she will go down and look upon the corpses. There, 
leaning " by a pillar" in the royal place — like King 
Joash at his coronation, or King Josiah when he sware 
to the covenant — she beholds Ulysses. But he is still 
in his beggar's weed, and after twenty years of absence 
she is slow to recognise him. Eoth Eurycleia and 
Telemachus break into anger at her incredulity. The 
king himself is outwardly as little moved as ever. He 
will give tokens of his identity hereafter. Eor the 
present there are precautions to be taken. The slaughter 
of so many nobles of Ithaca will scarce be taken lightly 









THE RECOGNITION BY PENELOPE. 117 

when it is heard in the island ; it must not he known 
ahroad until he can try the temper of his subjects, and 
gather a loyal host around him. All traces of the 
bloody scene which has just been enacted must he care- 
fully concealed ; the house must ring with harp, and 
song, and dance, that all who hear may think the queen 
has made her choice at last, and is holding her wedding- 
feast to-day — as, in truth, in a better sense she shall. 
Ulysses himself goes to the bath to wash away the 
stains of slaughter. Thence he comes forth endued once 
more by his guardian goddess with the " hyacinthine " 
locks and the grand presence which he had worn in the 
court of Phaeacia. He appeals now to his wife's memory, 
for she yet gives no sure sign of recognition : — 

" Lady, the gods that in Olympus dwell 
Have, beyond mortal women, given to thee 
Heart as of flint, which none can soften well. 
Lives not a wife who could endure, save thee, 
Her lord to slight, who, roaming earth and sea, 
Comes to his own land in the twentieth year. 
Haste, Eurycleia, and go spread for me 
Some couch, that I may sleep — but not with her." 

Penelope does recognise the form and features — it is 
indeed, to all outward appearance, the Ulysses from 
whom she parted in tears twenty years ago. But such 
appearances are deceitful ; gods have been known, ere 
now, to put on the form of men to gain the love of 
mortals. She will put him to one certain test she 
wots of. " Give him his own bed," she says to the 
nurse ; "go, bring it forth from what was our bridal 
chamber." But the couch of which she speaks is, as 



118 THE ODYSSEY. 

she and he both well know, immovable. Its peculiar 
structure, as detailed in Homer's verse, is by no means 
easy to unravel. But it is formed in some cunning 
fashion out of the stem of an olive-tree, rooted and 
growing, round which the hero himself had built a 
bridal chamber. Move it? — "There lives no mortal," 
exclaims Ulysses, "who could stir it from its place." 
Then, at last, all Penelope's long doubts are solved in 
happy certainty : — 

(i Then from her eyelids the quick tears did start, 
And she ran to him from her place, and threw 
Her arms about his neck, and a warm dew 
Of kisses poured upon him, and thus spake : 
c Frown not, Odysseus ; thou art wise and true ! 
But God gave sorrow, and hath grudged to make 
Our path to old age sweet, nor willed us to partake 

" * Youth's joys together. Yet forgive me this, 
Nor hate me that when first I saw thy brow 
I fell not on thy neck, and gave no kiss, 
Nor wept in thy dear arms as I weep now. 
For in my breast a bitter fear did bow 
My soul, and I lived shuddering day by day, 
Lest a strange man come hither, and avow 
False things, and steal my spirit, and bewray 
My love ; such guile men scheme, to lead the pure astray. 



" ' But now, since clearly thou unf oldest this, 
The secret of our couch, which none hath read, 
Save only thee and me and Actoris, 
Whom my sire gave me, when I first was wed, 
To guard the chamber of our bridal bed — 
Now I believe against my own belief. ' 
She ending a desire of weeping bred 
Within him, and in tears the noble chief 
Clasped his true wife, exulting in their glorious grief. 



THE RECOGNITION BY PENELOPE. 119 

*' Sweet as to swimniers the dry land appears, 
Whose bark Poseidon in the angry sea 
Strikes with a tempest, and in pieces tears, 
And a few swimmers from the white deep flee, 
Crested with salt foam, and with tremulous knee 
Spring to the shore exulting ; even so 
Sweet was her husband to Penelope, 
Nor from his neck could she at all let go 
Her white arms, nor forbid her thickening tears to flow." 

When they retire to rest, each has a long tale to tell. 
The personal adventures of Ulysses alone (however 
careful he might have been to abridge them in some 
particulars for his present auditor) would have made 
up many an Arabian Mght's entertainment. There 
would surely have been little time left for Penelope's 
story, but that Minerva's agency lengthens the ordinary 
night — 

" Nor from the rolling river of Ocean's stream 
Suffered the golden- throned Dawn to beam, 
Or yoke the horses that bear light to men." 

Here, according to our modern notions of complete- 
ness, the Odyssey should surely end. Accordingly 
some critics have surmised that the twenty-fourth and 
last book is not Homer's, but a later addition. Eut 
we may very well suppose that the primitive taste for 
narrative in the poet's day was more simple and child- 
like; that an ancient Greek audience would inquire, 
as our own children would, into all the details of the 
sequel, and not be satisfied even with the comprehensive 
assertion that " they lived happy ever afterwards." We 
have therefore, in the text as it has come down to us, a 
kind of supplement to the tale, which, as is the case 



120 THE ODYSSEY. 

with, the later scenes in some of Shakespeare's tragedies, 
rather weakens the force of the real catastrophe. An 
episode at the beginning of this last book shows us 
again the regions of the dead, to which the god Mer- 
cury is conducting the spirits of the dead suitors — pale 
ghosts who follow him, gibbering and cowering with 
fear, into that " sunless land." The main purpose of 
the poet seems to be the opportunity once more of in- 
troducing the shades of the great heroes, Achilles and 
Agamemnon ; the latter contrasting his own miserable 
and dishonoured end with that of Achilles, blest above 
all mortals, dying in battle with all the flower of Ilium 
and Greece around him, and leaving a name which is 
a sound of glory over the whole earth. So also does 
he contrast, to Penelope's honour, her fidelity with the 
treachery of his own queen Clytemnestra ; giving voice 
to a prophecy which has been fulfilled almost beyond 
even a poet's aspirations : — 

" to her first one love how true was she ! 
Nought shall make dim the flower of her sweet fame 
For ever, but the gods unceasingly 
Shall to the earth's inhabitants her name, 
Wide on the wings of song, with endless praise proclaim." 

Ulysses himself has yet to visit and make himself 
known to his aged father Laertes, who is still alive, 
but living in sad retirement on his island-farm, solacing 
himself as well as he may with pruning and tending his 
orchard-grounds. The recognition scene, in which the 
scar left by the boar's tusk is once more the touchstone, 
will seem tedious, as savouring too much of repetition, 
to most readers of our day.- But there is one point 



THE RECOGNITION BY PENELOPE. 121 

which, has a special and simple beauty of its own. 
When Laertes seems yet incredulous as to his son's 
identity, Ulysses reminds him how, when he was 
yet a child, following his father about the orchards, and 
begging with a child's pertinacity, he had given him 
" for his very own " a certain number of apple, fig, and 
pear trees and vines — all which he can still remember 
and enumerate. The token is irresistible, and the old 
man all but faints for joy. 

An attempt at rebellion on the part of some of his 
Ithacan subjects, who are enraged at his slaughter of 
their nobles, and which is headed by the father of the 
dead Antinous, fails to revive the fading interest of the 
tale. The ringleader falls by a spear cast by the trem- 
bling hand of Laertes, and the malcontents submit, 
after a brief contest, to their lawful chief. 

A hint of future travel for the hero leaves his history 
in some degree still incomplete. A penance had been 
imposed upon him by the seer Tiresias, by which alone 
he could appease Neptune for the cruel injury inflicted 
on his son, the giant Polyphemus. He must seek out 
some people who had never seen the sea, and never 
eaten salt, and there offer sacrifice to the god. Then, 
and only then, he might hope to reign for the rest of 
his life in peace amongst his islanders. Of the ful- 
filment of this pilgrimage the poet tells us nothing. 
Other legends represent Ulysses as meeting his death 
at last from the hand of his own son Telegonus (born 
of his amour with Circe), who had landed in the island 
of Ithaca on a piratical enterprise. We may remark the 
coincidence — or the imitation — in the later legend of 



122 THE ODYSSEY. 

the British Arthur, who is slain in battle by his illegi- 
timate son Mordred. The veil which even tradition 
leaves hanging over the great wanderer's fate is no in- 
appropriate conclusion to his story. A life of inaction, 
even in his old age, seems hardly suited to the poetical 
conception of this hero of unrest. In the fragmentary 
legends of the Middle Ages there is almost material for 
a second Odyssey. There, the Greek voyager becomes 
the pioneer of Atlantic discoverers — sailing still on into 
the unknown "West in search of the Earthly Paradise, 
founding new cities as he goes, and at last meeting his 
death in Atlantic waters. The Italian poets — Tasso, 
Pulci, and especially Dante — adopted the tradition. 
In the ' Inferno ' of the latter, the spirit of Ulysses thus 
discloses the last scenes of his career : — 

" Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence 
Of my old father, nor return of love, 
That should have crowned Penelope with joy, 
Could overcome in me the zeal I had 
To explore the world, and search the ways of life, 
Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sailed 
Into the deep illimitable mam, 
With but one bark, and the small faithful band 
That yet cleaved to me. As Iberia far, 
Far as Marocco, either shore I saw, 
And the Sardinian and each isle beside 
Which round that ocean bathes. Tardy with age 
Were I and my companions, when we came 
To the strait pass, where Hercules ordained 
The boundaries not to be o'erstepped by man.* 
The walls of Seville to my right I left, 
On the other hand already Ceuta past. 
e brothers ! ' I began, ' who to the west 



* The Straits of Gibraltar. 



THE RECOGNITION BY PENELOPE. 123 

Through perils without number now have reached ; 
To this the short remaining watch, that yet 
Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof 
Of the unpeopled world, following the track 
Of Phoebus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang : 
Ye were not formed to live the life of brutes, 
But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.' 
With these few words I sharpened for the voyage 
The mind of my associates, that I then 
Could scarcely have withheld them. To the dawn 
Our poop we turned, and for the witless flight 
Made our oars wings,* still gaining on the left. 
Each star of the other pole night now beheld, 
And ours so low, that from the ocean floor 
It rose not. Five times re-illumed, as oft 
Vanished the light from underneath the moon, 
Since the deep way we entered, when from far 
Appeared a mountain dim, loftiest methought 
Of all I e'er beheld. Joy seized us straight ; 
But soon to mourning changed. From the new land 
A whirlwind sprung, and at her foremost side 
Did strike the vessel. Thrice it whirled her round 
With all the waves ; the fourth time lifted up 
The poop, and sank the prow : so fate decreed : 
And over us the booming billow closed." 

— Inferno, xxvi. (Cary's transl. ) 

Thus also Mr Tennyson — drawing from Dante not 
less happily than he so often does from Homer — makes 
his Ulysses resign the idle sceptre into the hands 
of the home-keeping Telemachus, and tempt the seas 
once more in quest of new adventures : — 

" There lies the port : the vessel puffs her sail : 
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, 
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me, 
That ever with a frolic welcome took 
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 



The metaphor is Homer's, Odyss. xi. 124. 



124 THE ODYSSEY. 

Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old : 
Old age hath, yet his honour and his toil ; 
Death closes all, but something ere the end, 
Some work of noble note, may yet be done. 



'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite • 
The sounding furrows : for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die. 
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down : 
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew." 






CHAPTEE XL 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



The resemblance which these Homeric poems bear, in 
many remarkable features, to the romances of medi- 
aeval chivalry, has been long ago remarked, and has 
already been incidentally noticed in these pages. The 
peculiar caste of kings and chiefs — or kings and knights, 
as they are called in the Arthurian and Carlovingian 
tales — before whom the unfortunate "churls" tremble 
and fly like sheep, is a feature common to both. 
" Then were they afraid when they saw a knight " — is 
the pregnant sentence which, in Mallory's ' King Ar- 
thur/ reveals a whole volume of social history ; for the 
knight, in the particular instance, was but riding quietly 
along, and there ought to have been no reason why the 
" churls " should dread the sight of a professed redresser 
of grievances. But even so Ulysses condescends to use 
no argument to this class but the active use of his staff ; 
and Achilles dreads above all things dying " the death 
of a churl " drowned in a brook. It is only the noble, 
the priest, and the divine bard who emerge into the 
light of romance. The lives and feelings of the mere 



126 THE ODYSSEY. 

toilers for bread are held unworthy of the minstrel's cele- 
bration. Just as in the early romances of Christendom 
we do not get much lower in the social scale than the 
knight and the lady, the bishop and the wizard, so in 
these Homeric lays — even in the more domestic Odyssey, 
unless we make Eumaeus the exception — the tale still 
clings to the atmosphere of courts and palaces, and 
ignores almost entirely, unless for the purpose of draw- 
ing out a simile or illustration, the life-drama of the 
great mass of human kind. In both these cycles of 
fiction we find represented a state of things — whether 
we call it the " heroic age " or the " age of chivalry 1 
— which could hardly have existed in actual life ; and 
in both the phase of civilisation, and the magnificence 
of the properties and the scenery, seem far beyond what 
the narrators could have themselves seen and known. 

The character of the hero must not be judged by 
modern canons of morality. With all the honest pur- 
pose and steadfast heart which we willingly concede to 
him, we cannot but feel there is a shiftiness in his pro- 
ceedings from first to last which scarcely savours of true 
heroism. We need not call him, as Thersites does in 
Shakespeare, " that dog-fox Ulysses," nor even go quite 
so far as to look upon him as what a modern translator 
terms him, " the Scapin of epic poetry;" but we see 
in him the embodiment of prudence, versatility, and 
expediency, rather than of the nobler and less selfish 
virtues. Ulysses, both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, 
is the diplomatist of his age \ and it is neither his fault 
nor Homer's that the diplomacy of that date was less 
refined, and less skilful in veiling its coarser features. 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 127 

Even in much later times, dissimulation has been held 
an indispensable quality in rulers ; * and an English 
philosopher tells us plainly that " the intriguing spirit, 
the overreaching manner, and the over-refinement of 
art and policy, are naturally incident to the experienced 
and thorough politician, "t At the same time, it must be 
remembered that Ulysses employs deceit only where it 
was recognised and allowed by the moral code of the age 
— against his enemies ; he is never for a moment other- 
wise than true to his friends. Nay, while the kings and 
leaders in the Iliad are too fairly open to the reproach of 
holding cheap the lives and the interests of the meaner 
multitude who followed them, Ulysses is, throughout 
his long wanderings, the sole protecting providence, so 
far as their wilfulness will allow him, of his followers 
as well as of himself. 

The tale of his wanderings has been a rich mine of 
wealth for poets and romancers, painters and sculptors, 
from the dim date of the age which we call Homer's 
down to our own. In this wonderful poem, be its 
authorship what it may, lie the germs of thousands of 
the volumes which fill our modern libraries. Not that 
all their authors are either wilful plagiarists or even 
conscious imitators ; but because the Greek poet, first 
of all whose thoughts have been preserved to us in 
writing, touched, in their deepest as well as their 
lightest tones, those chords of human action and pas- 
sion which find an echo in all hearts and in all ages. 

Eirst, that is to say, of all whose utterances we re- 

* " Qui nescit dissinmlare, nescit regnare." 
t Shaftesbury's Characteristics. 



128 THE ODYSSEY. 

gard as merely human. There are, indeed, other recorded 
utterances to which the song of Homer, unlike as it is, 
has yet wonderful points of resemblance. For the 
student of Scripture, the prince of heathen poets pos- 
sesses a special interest. It is quite unnecessary to 
insist upon the actual connection which some enthusi- 
astic champions of sacred literature have either traced 
or fancied between the lays of the Greek bard and the 
inspired records of the chosen people. Whether the 
Hebrew chronicles, in any form, could have reached 
the eye or ear of the poet in his many wanderings 
is, to say the least, extremely doubtful. But Homer 
bears an independent witness to the truth and accuracy 
of the sacred narrative, so far as its imagery and diction 
are to be taken into account, which is very remark- 
able and valuable. Allowing for the difference in the 
local scenery, the reader of the Iliad may well fancy 
at times that he is following the night-march of Abraham, 
the conquests of Joshua, or the wars of the Kings ; 
while in the Odyssey the same domestic interiors, the 
same primitive family life, the same simple patriarchal 
relations between the king or chief of the tribe and his 
people, remind us in every page of the fresh and living 
pictures of the book of Genesis. Fresh and living the 
portraits still are, in both cases, after the lapse of so 
many centuries, because in both the writers drew faith- 
fully from what was before their eyes, without any 
straining after effect — without any betrayal of that self- 
consciousness which spoils many an author's best work, 
by forcing his own individuality upon the reader in- 
stead of that of the scenes and persons whom he repre- 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 129 

sents. To trace the many points of resemblance be- 
tween these two great poems and the sacred records as 
fully as they might be traced would require a volume 
in itself. It may be enough in these pages shortly to 
point out some few of the many instances in which 
Homer will be found one of the most interesting, be- 
cause assuredly one of the most unconscious, commen- 
tators on the Bible. 

The Homeric kings, like those of Israel and Judah, 
lead the battle in their chariots : Priam sits " in the 
gate," like David or Solomon : Ulysses, when he 
would assert his royalty, stands by a pillar, as stood 
Joash and Josiah. Their riches consist chiefly in 
"sheep and oxen, men-servants and maid-servants.' ' 
When Ulysses, in the Hiad, finds Diomed sleeping 
outside his tent, — "and his comrades lay sleeping 
around him, and under their heads they had their 
shields, and their spears were fixed in the ground by 
the butt-end" * — we have the picture, almost word for 
word, of Saul's night-bivouac when he was surprised 
by David: "And behold, Saul lay sleeping within 
the trench, and his spear stuck in the ground at his 
bolster, and the people lay round about him." Ulysses 
and Diomed think it not beneath their dignity, as 
kings or chiefs, to act what we should consider the part 
of a spy, like Gideon in the camp of the Midianites. 
Lycurgus the Thracian slays with an ox-goad, like 
Shamgar in the Book of Judges. The very cruelties 
of warfare are the same — the insults too frequently 

* II. x. 150. 
a. c. vol. ii i 



130 THE ODYSSEY. 

offered to the dead body of an enemy, " the children 
dashed against the stones " — the miserable sight which 
Priam foresees in the fall of his city, as Isaiah in the 
prophetic burden of Babylon.* 

The outward tokens of grief are wholly Eastern. 
Achilles, in the Iliad, when he hears of the death of 
his friend Patroclus — Laertes, in the Odyssey, when 
he believes his son's return hopeless — throw dust upon 
their heads, like Joshua and the elders of Israel when 
they hear of the disaster at Ai. King Priam tears his 
hair and beard in his vain appeal to Hector at the 
Scaean gates, as Ezra does, when he hears of the tres- 
passes of the Jewish princes.t Penelope sits " on the 
threshold " to weep, just as Moses " heard the people 
weeping, every man in the door of his tent." " Call 
for the mourning women," says the prophet Jeremiah, J 
" that they may come ; and let them make haste, and 
take up a wailing for us." So when the Trojan king 
bears off his dead son at last to his own palace, the 
professional mourners are immediately sent for — " the 
bards, to begin the lament." § As Moses carries forth 
the bones of Joseph into Canaan, and David gathers 
carefully those of Saul and Jonathan from the men of 
Jabesh-Gilead, so Nestor charges the Greeks, when 
they have almost determined to quit Troy in despair, 
to carry the bones of their slain comrades home to 
their native land. Sarpedon's body is borne to his 
native Lycia, there to be honoured " with a mound and 
with a column" — as Jacob set up a pillar for his dead 

* Isa. xiii. 16. t Ezra ix. 3. 

i Jer. ix. 17. § II. xxiv. 720. 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 131 

Eachel on the road by Bethlehem. The Philistines, 
after the battle of Gilboa, bestow the armour of Saul 
in the house of their goddess Ashtaroth : the sword of 
Goliath is laid up as a trophy with the priest Ahime- 
lech, "wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod;"* even 
so does Hector vow to hang up the armour of Mene- 
laus in the temple of Apollo in Troy. 

The more peaceful images have the same remarkable 
likeness. The fountain in the island of Ithaca, faced 
with stone, the work of the forefathers of the nation, 
Ithacus and Neritus, recalls that " well of the oath " 
— Beer-sheba — which Abraham dug, or that by which 
the woman of Samaria sat, known as " the well of 
our father Jacob." The stone which the goddess 
Minerva upheaves to hurl against Mars, which " men 
of old had set to be a boundary of the land" — the two 
white stones, t of unknown date and history even in 
the poet's own day, of which he doubts whether they 
be sepulchral or boundary, which Achilles made the 
turning-point for the chariot-race,— these cannot fail 
to remind us of the stones Bohan and Ebenezer, and 
of the warning in the Proverbs — "Kemove not the 
ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set up." 
The women grinding at the mill, the oxen treading 
out the corn, the measure by cubit, the changes of 
raiment, the reverence due to the stranger and to the 
poor, — the dowry given by the bridegroom, as by way 
of purchase, not received with the bride, — all these 
are as familiar to us in the books of Moses as in the 

* 1 Sam. xxi. 9. t II. xxiii. 329. 



132 THE ODYSSEY. 

poems of Homer. The very figures of speech are the 
same. The passionate apostrophe of Moses and Isaiah 
— "Hear, heavens, and give ear, earth" — is used 
by Juno in the Iliad, and by Calypso in the Odyssey.* 
" Day" is commonly employed as an equivalent for fate 
or judgment ; " the half of one's kingdom" is held to be 
a right royal gift ; " the gates of hell" are the culmi- 
nation of evil. Telemachus swears " by the woes of 
his father," as Jacob does " by the fear of his father 
Isaac ; " and the curse pronounced on Phoenix by his 
father — that never grandchild of his begetting might 
sit upon his knees " t — recalls the sacred text in which 
we are told that " the children of Machir, the son of 
Manasseh, were brought up on Joseph's knees." 

Many and various have been the theories of inter- 
pretation which have been employed, by more or less 
ingenious writers, to develop what they have con- 
sidered the inner meaning of the poet's tale. Such 
speculations began at a very early date in literary history. 
They were current among Greek philosophers in the days 
of Socrates, but he himself would not admit them. It 
is impossible, and would be wearisome even if it were 
possible, to discuss them all. But one especially 
must be mentioned, not wholly modern, but which 
has won much favour of late in the world of scholars, 
— that in both poems we have certain truths of phy- 
sical and astronomical science represented under an 
allegorical form, imported into Greek fable from East- 
ern sources. This theory is, to say the least, so inter- 

* II. xv. 36. Od. v. 184. f II. ix. 455. 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 133 

esting and ingenious, that without presuming here to 
discuss its truth, it claims a brief mention. It may be 
fairest to put it in the words of one of its most enthu- 
siastic advocates. So far as it applies to the Odyssey, 
it stands thus : — 

" The Sun [Ulysses] leaves his bride the Twilight 
[Penelope] in the sky, where he sinks beneath the sea, 
to journey in silence and darkness to the scene of the 
great fight with the powers of Darkness [the Siege of 
Troy]. The ten weary years of the war are the weary 
hours of the night. . . . The victory is won : 
but the Sun still longs to see again the beautiful bride 
from whom he parted yester-eve. Dangers may await 
him, but they cannot arrest his steps : things lovely 
may lavish their beauty upon him, but they cannot 
make him forget her. . . . But he cannot reach 
his home until another series of ten long years have 
come to an end — the Sun cannot see the Twilight until 
another day is done."* 

So, in the Iliad, as has been already noticed, Paris 
and the Trojans represent the powers of Darkness, 
" who steal away the beautiful Twilight [Helen] from 
the western sky;" while Achilles is the Sun, who puts 
to rout these forces of the Night, t 

In contrast, though not necessarily in contradiction, 
to this physical allegory, stands the moral interpreta- 
tion, a favourite one with some of the mediaeval stu- 

* Cox's * Tales of the Gods and Heroes/ p. IviL 

+ Iliad, p. 8. (Paris is said to be the Sanscrit Pani — " the 

deceiver ; " Helen is Sarama — " the Dawn; w and Achilles is the 

solar hero Aharyu.) 



134 THE ODYSSEY. 

dents of Homer, which, sees in the Odyssey nothing 
less than the pilgrimage of human life — beset with 
dangers and seductions on every side, yet blessed with 
divine guidance, and reaching its goal at last, through 
suffering and not without loss. Every point in the 
wanderings of the hero has been thus made to teach 
its parable, more or less successfully. The different 
adventures have each had their special application : 
Circe represents the especially sensual appetites ; the 
Lotus-eating is indolence; the Sirens the temptations of 
the ear; the forbidden oxen of the Sun the "flesh- 
pots of Egypt" — the sin of gluttony. It is at least 
well worthy of remark how, throughout the whole nar- 
rative, the false rest is brought into contrast with the 
true. Not in the placid indolence of the Lotus-eaters, 
not in the luxurious halls of Circe or in the grotto of 
Calypso, nor even in the joyous society of the Phaea- 
cians, but only in the far-off home, the seat of the 
higher and better affections, is the pilgrim's real rest- 
ing-place. The key-note of this didactic interpretation, 
which has an undoubted beauty and pathos of its own, 
making the old Greek poet, like the Mosaic law, a 
schoolmaster to Christian doctrine, has been well 
touched by a modern writer:— 

st beautiful and strange epitome 
Of this our life, while through the tale we trace 
Homeless Ulysses on the land and sea ! 
From childhood to old age it is the face 
Of heaven-lost, yearning man : from place to place 
Whether he wander forth abroad, or knows 
No change but of home-nature and of grace, 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 135 

Still is he as one seeking for repose — 

A man of many thoughts, a man of many woes." 

Some of the early religious commentators pushed 
such interpretations to extravagance ; they dealt with 
Homer as the extreme patristic school of theology 
dealt with the Old Testament : they so busied them- 
selves in seeking for mystical interpretations in every 
verse, that they held the plain and literal meaning of 
the text as of almost secondary importance. It was 
said of one French scholar — D'Aurat — a man of some 
learning, that he spent his life in trying to find 
all the Bible in Homer. Such men saw Paradise 
disguised in the gardens of Alcinous; the tempta- 
tion of the chaste Bellerophon was but a pagan ver- 
sion of the story of Joseph; the fall of Troy evidently 
prefigured, to their fancy, the destruction of Jerusalem. 
Some went even further, and turned this tempting wea- 
pon of allegory against their religious opponents : thus 
Doctor Jacobus Hugo saw the Lutheran heretics pre- 
figured in the Lotus-eaters of the Odyssey, and thought 
that the reckless Antinous was a type of Martin Luther 
himself. Those who are content to take Homer as he 
is, the poet of all ages, without seeking to set him 
up either as a prophet or as a moral philosopher, may 
take comfort from the brief criticism of Lord Bacon 
upon all over -curious interpretation — "I do rather 
think the fable was first, and the exposition devised 
after." The most ingenious theories as to the hidden 

■* Williams's ' Christian Scholar.' 



136 THE ODYSSEY. 

meaning of the song are at best but the mists which 
the Homerists have thrown round their deity — 

" The moony vapour rolling round the king." 

He moves among them all, a dim mysterious figure, 
but hardly less than divine. 






END OF THE ODYSSEY. 



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